Baby Poop

I think I pooped

Whenever Baby J. gets red in the face and stops breathing, I know it can only mean one thing. Poop. I swear sometimes when she's pooping, she looks like she's going to explode. Sometimes, she'll stand up against a piece of furniture, squat down, and push so hard she grunts. You'd think she was constipated, but she's always been that way. It doesn't matter what she's eaten, she acts like she's trying to pass a brick out of her butt.

Did anyone ever warn you about all of the different kinds of poop? The one poop I was absolutely unprepared for was the first poop, the meconium. I knew of it; I'd read about it in the baby books, but the descriptions I read in no way clearly depicted what it was actually like. When they said it would be a black tar-like poop, I thought, "Ok, a small black sludge". I mean, she hadn't even eaten yet, how much and how bad could it be? It was bad. It was the first night in the hospital, and my wife was asleep. I heard Baby J. waking, and I checked her diaper. The thing inside was awful. How it could have passed out of the bowels of a creature that was so beautiful is beyond me. This stuff was everywhere, and it was stretchy and gooey, and it didn't wipe off her butt, it just stuck to everything, and it was such a large blob of it that I thought it might have been the remains of some primordial giant black amoeba that had somehow become trapped within my baby's diaper.

Then, over the next two days, there were three more of those black, disgusting poops.

After that, they were normal, for a newborn. Runny, orange colored almost like the consistency of grey poupon poop were coming nearly every hour. I think she must have had ten or more poops a day sometimes. Who poops that much? Could you imagine if we didn't have diapers? It would be everywhere. Do other animals have this problem? Do baby monkeys or zebras just have slime coming out of their butts for the first three months of their lives?

Then, you get the occasional sicky poop, like when she has a cold or a stomach bug. Then, it's green and mucousy, and it smells. God, it smells. It smells so bad I have to cover my nose, because if I don't, I wretch. I'm not one usually bothered by smells. I had a job when I was a teenager where I had to visit the local dump frequently. I'm used to awful smells. This though, this stuff coming out of my sick daughter's butt is something else. It isn't Earthly. It smells so bad, it has to be alien.

Now, that she's older and on solids, she has firmer, brown poops, and they don't smell so pretty, especially after she's eaten cheese. Whenever she eats cheese, she has bubbly farts that fill the room with a sour odor.

Oh well, if you're reading this and you're not a parent, and you some day plan on being a parent, realize that at some point you're going to find yourself obsessing about poop. You'd think you wouldn't. You'd think, "Oh who cares? It's smelly. End of story." But no, there's a lot to talk about. I guarantee it.

D.