Confunction Junction........What's Your Function?*
Chirp has a link to a Malcolm Gladwell article from The New Yorker sometime last November. It is a fascinating account of the development of the modern disposable diaper. Anyone who has diapered a baby or may ever diaper a baby should read this. (OK, everyone should read this. You never know if you will one day be diapering someone. I, for one, was never going to have children. Nor a husband. Ha! God had other plans.......)

Two things stand out for me in this article.........

1. He mentions the original disposable diaper being held on with pins. The article gauges this as being in the early 60s. When Embot was born in '79, Mt. Sinai in Milwaukee used Pampers that had to be pinned on. What a nightmare. Don't think there wasn't a wild moment when I fantasized about running out of the hospital, leaving the little pooper behind and changing my name and never looking back. Pinning the cloth diapers that the Didy-Wash man brought was awful (at first) but not nearly as bad as pinning two layers of thick synthetic stuff.

2. The diaper industry uses the euphemism "insult" for that which the diaper must handle. I wish I had this word at my disposal back in the diapering day. (Oh, Daddy, I think you check young what's-his-name. I perceive an insult.)
When Eddie was a baby, function was the code word. (Eddie has had a function.) That was alright, except that the children applied their own particular logic to the situation and decided that function must be a scatalogical word. I thought they'd hyperventilate laughing when they heard a radio advertisement for a banquet hall that asked, "Are you planning a function?"

*Confunction Junction was a little song we would sing while diapering young Edward. Using that tune from SchoolHouse Rock - Conjunction Junction.

PS - I can now pin any kind of diaper, one handed, in the dark.
Practice makes an expert out of the most inept.

PPS - Em, sorry for mentioning your name in conjunction with functions. We know you're brilliant. But I'm not going to imply that you sprung from the womb toilet trained and well versed in HTML. We all have to start somewhere.