Poo 24/7

Once you become a parent, the one thing you have to get over is poo. Because there is no escaping it.

When V was first born, her first few poos were like black tar. That apparently is normal; it's called meconium and it is all the crap that she was saving up in her body during gestation, that she was now giving to me as a "hi, nice to meet you, here is some black poo" present. I would swat at it with these flimsy, tiny squares of wet tissue they called baby wipes, and it would just morph into little black peaks on her butt. A spatula would have worked a lot better.

Then once V started eating, her poo got yellow/brown and liquidy. Liquidy as in the consistency of pea soup. And lots of sharting. I'd be feeding her in my lap and I could feel the heat of each shart against my leg. At first I'd run with her at the first shart and change her diaper. I stopped doing that once I realized that usually she wasn't finished with just one. I would open her diaper and there would be MORE COMING OUT, and I would shove more wipes, diapers, whatever was in reach under her butt to contain the ever continuing spillage. Meanwhile V would wriggle and kick, sticking her feet in her poo and waving them around, and I would throw wipes at her like it was a ticker tape parade.

Once I was changing V's diaper and she shat a stream of poo that landed on my hand, the wall and the floor. For three seconds, I froze. Time stopped. All was silent. And then chaos ensued. "DON'T PANIC!" I was yelling, "DON'T PANIC!" over and over. To who I'm not sure, since it was just me and V in the apartment, and she was clearly ok with the whole situation. It's times like those when you are grateful for the fact that the baby wipes seem to have all been glued to each other, so that when you pull on one, you get a whole string of them, because I needed all one hundred fifty of those suckers.