Ph D in Poop
Sadie's recent post at Phin's Fish Bowl inspired this post. In particular, Sadie was trying to warn Phin and the Mrs. Phin about The Poop Up The Back Phenomenon. This is a particularly nasty and frequent occurence in the baby world. It defies the basic laws of physics, yet it is true. A baby lying flat on its back will squeeze crap to the shoulders, no matter what you do.In the past three months, I have gained quite a Defecation Education. You could say that I've received a BS in Shit that Sticks, a Masters in Excrement Management, a Ph D in Poop, and a Minor in The Smell of Feces.
I am being fitted for my crap mortar board next week. And I'm starting my research next month. (Grossed out yet?)
This advanced education in baby poop has quite swollen my head (and my trash can) and I find myself keen to share the highlights of this education with you, my gentle and faithful readers. So, here goes.
All you ever needed to know about baby crap, but did not want to ask:
The first baby shit that a new parent will encounter is the meconium. Believe me, there is no misidentifying this shit. It is a dark brown or blackish color with the consistency and stickiness of a bucket of sealing tar. This shit sticks to everything except a baby wipe, making the cleaning of ass crack and your own fingers a near impossibility that the rocket scientists at NASA ought to put their efforts toward. Additionallly, they or the folks at 3M ought to investigate meconium for its ability to hold those tiles on the shuttle, or a million household uses.
The second baby shit a new parent encounters is breast milk shit. This is not like the meconium. For one thing, there is a lot more of it. And, it is a startlingly different color. Breast milk shit is a yellowish-green color, but that isn't what makes it remarkable. Oh no. This one is freaky for what is in the shit. You can visibly identify little white rice-like granules in it. Like maggots almost. It will freak you out and you will be afraid to ask the doctor as it will come so quickly on the heels of the freaky meconium.
Eventually you will transition to what I have come to call Standard Baby Shit. This is formula-fed crap. It too is a yellowish-green, mostly lacking in maggot-like additions, that smells like the seventh circle of hell on a particularly bad week. You can smell it from 10 yards away. It is a lingering smell that is unavoidable. Of course, it is possible to develop a resistance to it and thereby find yourself losing friends who are unaware that you don't have a personal hygiene problem, rather...you have a shitty baby. God help you if you do not immediately place the offending dirty diaper in a non-inhabited-by-humans location. (If you have some pests you'd like to get rid of, see about placing one of these diapers in the area of infestation and just see if the critters don't hie themselves off to more comfortable digs. Note to self: Contact Raid.)
While Standard Baby Shit is the norm, it is not the end of the line. I've been surveying an elective in Sick Baby Shit for the past two weeks. My short experience with this suggests that the chemical and physical properties are somewhat unset on this category. For example, it can vary widely in olfactory offensiveness, volume, and color. Yesterday I changed a diaper that was a dark army green and looked like plaster of paris, only wetter and stickier.
But Baby Poop has other interesting characteristics. For one, it is like kryptonite to teenagers. Mouthy obnoxious know-it-alls run in fear from a poopy diaper. It is the most amazing thing. If there were a free iPod loaded with every song a teenager could want on it stuck in a poopy diaper, the thing would go unclaimed. No one would make any attempts to recover the treasure, but would consider it a dreadful shame and forever lost to civilization.
I mentioned it briefly above, but the smell of baby poop also deserves in-depth study. As vile as it smells, it can become almost absent to those who smell it frequently, like the parents. You get used to the smell. You can still smell it, of course, but for some reason you begin grow accustomed to it, even find the smell comforting. I have developed a theory that it is this nature of parents to grow accustomed to the stench of their children's shit that led to the popular vernacular saying "your shit don't stink." Because to some, it doesn't.
Baby poop is unlike any other substance on the face of the Earth: it refuses to be contained. Liquid and gas take the shape of their containers while solids have a defined shape of their own. Baby poop is a category unto itself. It is most assuredly not a solid, having no defined shape. And, quite clearly it is not a gas. (Baby gas is a whole different essay.) Also, though, it can't be a liquid. It doesn't flow so much as creep, yet the movement of baby poop outside of the body has never been captured on video and remains a mystery. It cannot be contained by any diaper on the market, something you would think that they could have resolved by now. (Perhaps another challenge for NASA?)
As you can plainly see, my knowledge of baby poop is quite extensive and grows more everyday. I could write about it for days, yet I feel certain that I've run the course on these jokes.
I'll have to save the rest for a runny day. (Sorry, couldn't help myself.)
