Poopie Particulars

Before I became a parent, I used to wonder why everyone who had a baby was totally obsessed with its fecal material. Now that I have a kid, I understand. Poopie is vitally important in monitoring your baby's health (and it provides you with great gross-out stories to embarrass them with when they're teenagers).

I've discovered that what people told me before Khan was born is true: you don't care how disgusting your own child is. And it's a good thing, because they WILL get urine, spit-up, and/or poopie on every available surface in your home. There, now no one will ever want to visit me again.

I breastfed Khan from birth to nine months. There's a lot of advantages to breastfeeding; you pass on immunities, it encourages bonding and (my main reason for doing it), it's free. One of the other great things about breastfeeding is that, as long as your kid is exclusively breastfed, their poopie doesn't smell bad. As The Scientist put it, it kind of smells like 'weird popcorn'(I thought 'buttermilk'). Of course, it's also almost completely liquid and will sometimes leak out of the diaper, but hey, everything's a trade-off.

At four months we had to begin supplementing Khan with formula- don't judge me, he's a big kid and my breasts couldn't take it- and around the same time we started giving him real food. Out with the weird popcorn smell, in with the nasty poopie smell. On the up side, his cloth diapers were easier to clean; solid poopie is simple to scrape off, as opposed to liquid poopie.

Solid food also introduced a whole new range of...colors. Well, really only orange and green (and, once, hot pink, when I caught him gnawing on a chunk of sidewalk chalk). It also introduced constipation. Khan seems prone to it. We keep a supply of prunes on hand for this reason. It's pretty pitiful to see the little grunt and strain until he's red in the face. It's probably also pretty pitiful to see The Scientist and I cheering him on. "You can do it! Push! Out, bad poopies! Out!"

I never thought a smelly, disgusting diaper could make me so very happy.

Everything about your kid is fascinating, even their poopie. And that's totally OK so long as you don't go sharing it with everyone else.

Oh, oops.