Speaking of poop. . .

I never in my life imagined that I would be so interested in another person’s bowel movements. You could not have convinced me that I would have a person in my life whose poop I would study, noting color and texture, charting the frequency of said movements. Well, enter baby.

Baby poop is a fascinating study, particularly for a breastfeeding mom. Unless you are a pumping mom and feed from a bottle, which we do on occasion, you have absolutely no idea how much nutrition your child is getting. Then, how do you measure input? You measure output of course. I have charts from her first days of life where we noted every single poop (and pee, for that matter, which is equally important, just not as interesting). We were able to stop charting the poop factor after a couple weeks, but never lost interest in that fascinating yellow stuff.

You can’t talk about baby poop without discussing its evolution. That’s right, baby poop evolves. This is also something very new to me since I have had a child. First we started with the most foul, horrible substance known to humankind. It has a friendly name – meconium – but oh, it is not so friendly. If you’ve never seen this stuff, consider yourself lucky, but I will have to describe it to you. In your vast imagination, let’s start with plain poop. Let’s go with semi-diarrhea if you will. Then, I would like you to mix it with tar. Good. Next, stir in some rubber cement. Now you’re getting it! Finally, to top it off, we’ll add some flour to thicken it up. And it would come out of her like water from a faucet! It was supposed to be a “few” diapers full, not 10 PER DAY for THREE DAYS.

Next on our evolution, the poop gradually turned from black to green to get to the next stage: seedy yellow mustard. This was also an odd phenomenon. I found out later that it’s undigested, curdled milk, but at the time I wondered, who is feeding my baby sunflower seeds with mustard?

Gradually the poop evolved to something more poo-like, changing from day to day based on what I ate. For example, we discovered at one point that she didn’t do well with tomato sauce when her poop turned black.

It was during this stage that we had a few accidents. A blowout in the financial planner’s office was quite embarrassing. Poop was EVERYWHERE. A couple of bathtub poops – you don’t want to see that. We’re not talking floating Snickers bar here, we’re talking poop soup.

On to the stage we enjoyed the most: Intermittent Poop. I guess there is a point where breastfed babies are able to digest nearly all of their milk. The longest she went without going was 5 days. This was a nice stage.

Something happened though, and our newest stage is Frequent Poop. Today she pooped 3 times.

I’m a little afraid of the next stage: The Baby Who Eats Solids poop. The last thing in the world I want to change is a diaper with actual human-like poop in it.