Don't let the title of this blog put you off. This is a serious discourse on one of my young child's three main occupations. I'm not really sure that anyone has truly explored the diversity of baby poo. It is quite extraordinary. It's like playing a game of Russian Roulette with a loaded canon.
Just to satisfy those who really want to know, Max is doing really well. He is gaining weight and height and his attentive grandparents and parents who are monitoring him on a second to second basis pronounce all well. I still think he is the best in the world and would kill to protect him and lay down my life to save him. Fine, mush out of the way, back to the fecal discourse.
I mentioned before, the various colours. These have settled down into a sort of muddy brown colour. Do you know when you were young and you were using water based paints and you had washed the brush after each paint colour. The shade of brown that the cleaning water went, that is the colour of Max's poo. I refer to it as poo, because that is the name that I think suits it best. Feces is fine but it sounds far to clinical for this comedy. Shit is very coarse and not at all appropriate when referring to a child. So poo it is. The child poos.
Now most of the nappies are soiled in a very light way. This is fine, a quick flip of a cotton ball or baby wipe and it is all forgotten. The lad still lacks continence and little else can be expected. Some days however you get a real doozie.
They are pure comedy. The system is so ridiculous as to be comic. What intelligent designer would arrange things this way is beyond me. These nappies smell, feel and look like the Marx brothers are in charge of waste disposal in the human design shop. Let me tell you more.
The other day, Max had a lightly dirty but very wet nappy. I changed him on a new easy clean mat on a bed. This meant that he created a little easy clean mat bowl. That was fine he was gurgling away happily. I turned around to get a new nappy and as I did heard a baby farting noise behind me. I smiled to myself because it is a well known fact that farts are very funny to men. The smile was very quickly wiped off my face as I turned to see my little boy paddling in a little pond of poo. Oh Dear God, his legs were brown, his thighs were brown, his whole lower body was brown. There was no cotton ball or baby wipe that could soak up this desperate deluge. We grabbed him and ran for the sink. As I ran little drops ran from his legs to the bed sheets, the floor and most horribly my feet.
The sink washed him clean. The easy clean mat turned out to be exactly that. It turns out that our son is also the easy clean version. The clothes, the bed sheets, the floor and my feet, were less easy. I look back and laugh at that image of the little hippo wallowing in his little brown pool.
The second and no less dramatic incident I would like to relate is that of the inflating nappy. One of the real challenges of childcare is knowing when to change a nappy. Sometimes it is very obvious, the lingering smell that would curl your nose hairs. That's fine. Sometimes the smell is merely a fart and that's another nappy wasted and another slice of the rain forest irrevocably ripped asunder. Some other times the little fellow's face goes bright red and his brow furrows just like an old man who has not had his bran intake for the week and is in need of a good dose of concentrated prune juice.
Other times it is very obvious. Like Tuesday... He had just fed, he was happy, he was cooing gently and he farted. My hand was under his nappy at the time and I felt it inflate, I felt the air find an outlet along his back and I felt it deflate. At least I thought it was air. The brown stain that spread along his back made a lie of this thought. I whipped off his baby-gro and vest and was greeted by a war zone of a dorsal area. His poo had exploded up his back and to his neck and behind his ears. Small flecks were found at the tips of his south-most hairs. I looked in horror, I looked in awe. I laid him down and stood up and clapped!
Thank all that is good, poo is like gold, it can be spread very thin without loosing its colour. As such it can be easily cleaned off. A bath that evening saw to the last of it and though the clothes will never be the same again, the young fellow will always have that achievement under, over and all around his belt!
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