Poop! Part One

Let's talk about poop, baby (sing it)
Let's talk about you and me (sing it, sing it)
Let's talk about all the good things
And the bad things that may be
Let's talk about poop (come on)
Let's talk about poop (do it)
Let's talk about poop (uh-huh)
Let's talk about poop

All apologies to Salt N Pepa for stealing their hit song about sex (Let’s Talk About Sex) and turning it into a poop joke. But let’s face it, if it hadn’t been for sex, I wouldn’t be talking about poop right now. So it all comes full circle and all is right in the universe. Or something like that…

Back before our precious snowflake made her entrance into the world, I mused about how much poop she would actually create in our lives. I estimated (I think, but I’m too lazy to check) that there would be a high school basketball team’s starting line-up’s weight worth of poop in the first year. Six, maybe seven hundred pounds, or so.

Turns out, blessedly so, that we probably won’t hit that mark. What we have discovered, much to the relief of my nostrils, and the dismay of the baby wipes manufacturers, is that babies our baby’s age don’t poop every day, let alone multiple times every day. Though they do occasionally poop twice a day; more on that later.

Right now Baby Girl’s poop schedule is once every three to five days. This is great for me, as I am, as I may have mentioned before, Chief Diaper Changer. This is a position I volunteered for at first (watching a woman go through pregnancy causes some strange reactions to one’s own guilt about having played a part in said pregnancy), and am locked into by virtue of being a Stay-At-Home-Dad (a manly one, who spends what free time he does have doing manly things, like punching people and kicking heavy bags at the gym).

Aside from the frequency, the poops aren’t that smelly. Another relief, believe me. I’m bracing for when she starts on solid foods, when, I have been assured, both the frequency and pungency will increase dramatically. I’m also guessing they’ll get messier.

So far things haven’t been too messy. She has blown out a few diapers, resulting in me needing to give her a bath, something I have managed to do singlehandedly, which I promise you, was no easy task. Bathing Baby Girl is a pretty involved task, seeing as how she squirms like an eel. Also it isn’t easy because I have been guilted into giving her a bath the way Mommy prefers, which involves both me and baby girl taking a bath. My preferred, but no longer used method, was to put her in her bathing chair (essentially a water safe Laz-E-Boy), soap her up and spray her off with the removable showerhead we installed, flip her over, repeat and dry.

This method had a number of results: a) she got cleaned in a time/energy/effort efficient manner, b) Mommy accused me of treating my daughter like one of the fish down in Pike Place Market, c) baby girl tended to cry bloody murder the whole time, and finally d) I acquiesced to both Mommy and Baby Girl’s wishes that she be bathed in a more peaceful, less-likely-to-result-in-crying way.

The other result of the blown out diapers has been the effect it has on baby girl’s clothes. Specifically they get poop all over them, generally all over the inside of the back of the garment, because the poop tends to shoot up and out the back of Baby Girl’s diaper. One time it looked like someone had taken a paint roller, dipped it in a pan of brown paint, and rolled it down Baby Girl’s back. Not a pretty sight.

Now, the first time it happened, Mommy was ready to toss the soiled clothing in the garbage. Daddy, on the other hand, being strangely responsible, said “no”, and made her wash it. I mention this because, the first time Baby Girl really blew out a diaper on Daddy’s watch, it was an ungodly mess, and since I hadn’t let Mommy throw out the poop-stained clothing when she wanted to, I knew I couldn’t throw out the clothing now that I was the one who had to deal with it.

The problem is, I hate poop. I love poop jokes, talking about poop with my friends, laughing at the people who fall in poop etc., but I really hate the stuff itself. This is why I use what Mommy would describe as an unusually hefty amount of toilet paper when I myself poop. I want to avoid getting it on my hands at all costs.

So when faced with a piece of baby clothing which had been drenched in the stuff I took the following approach, since I couldn’t follow my first instinct and throw it out because Mommy would never have let me hear the end of it after I hadn’t let her do the same: I soaked it in the sink for a couple days, put it in a plastic bag and hid it under the sink in the spare bathroom until Mommy found it and berated me for being lazy and scared of poop. I was hoping she wouldn’t find it until Baby Girl grew out of it and I could toss it away guilt-free, no washing/handling/messing involved.