Petroleum Jilly

A week or so ago, we learned a valuable lesson. Never, ever, ever leave anything within reach of the crib. Because we live in a small apartment, Jilly’s crib is in the corner of her room, with her changing table perpendicular and pushed up against it. I often will leave the wipes container sitting on the changing table, rather than putting it away in the cupboard. Sometimes I hear her playing with it, but usually not. We’ve found Jilly has some food allergies lately, to carrots and snap peas thus far, that give her a nasty diaper rash. When the rash appears, it eats away at her skin and causes her lots of pain. In order to help heal her skin and make subsequent diaper changes easier on her, we slather her in Vaseline. I think you see where this is going….

One day, Steve went to get Jilly out of her crib, because she’d woken up from her nap. As he came in, he noticed she looked unusually shiny. As he looked a little closer, so did the crib, her bedding and pretty much everything around her. One look inside the crib told the story. Next to our glistening baby was an empty Vaseline container; one that had previously been half full. Oh yes. I had left the Vaseline on the changing table that morning, along with her wipes. She’d woken up from her nap and decide to amuse herself by painting everything with the petroleum jelly. I got home soon after Steve discovered this and got to participate in the clean up.

As you probably know, Vaseline is not exactly easy to clean up. It’s greasy consistency soaks into fabric and likes to stay there, since it’s not water-soluble. Great…. Jilly was the easiest part of the whole mess to clean up. Hehehe. We were able to wash her bedding a couple of times and it’s fine now, but it was a little difficult to start with. I guess we learned our lesson. Now, we always put things away, or at least out of her reach, especially the Vaseline.