Poop!

Before I had a baby I heard all of my parent friends talking about how their kids have blowouts and how they come at the worst times and are just horrid to deal with. I thought what a horrible thing to deal with but I guess it comes with having a baby. I wasn’t all the worried about blowouts, because we were planning on cloth diapers, and my baby was going to be best baby in the world and never ever have a blowout. Okay, so I didn’t really believe that 100% but there was a little bit of that in the back of my mind even if the sensible part of my brain was telling the magical-mystical part it was in la-la land again and that is it not humanly possible to not have blowouts.

Babies are simply predisposed to blowouts. They have a few things working against them. The first thing is they don’t know how to poop. No, really they don’t, some babies are better at pooping than others and some just don’t get it (like my kid). They have to bare down to get the poop out, and relax the poo shoot at the same time. When you really think about it, pooping is rather complicated and uses two opposing actions. Until I read it in a book I never thought of the process of eliminating waste as being complicated, but for a little itty-bitty person who has to learn to do everything it really is a bit of a challenge. Babies are learning the challenge of pooping, that’s why a baby might be straining and straining and getting all red faced, they aren’t constipated they just haven’t figured out how to relax the right portions of their body yet. They strain and strain and then BOOM it works and massive amounts of poo come out all. At. Once. A little paper diaper just can’t handle the strain and out it comes.

Not only do babies have to figure out how to poop but their little bodies are built for the purpose of creating blowouts. Babies, unlike normal human beings, don’t have butts; instead they have an elongated back which ends at their legs. About half way down their long back they have a groove, like an ice luge. Much to the same effect an ice luge has on alcohol does this groove have on poop. Only with an ice luge you are met with a delicious very cold shot of booze, with the poo groove you’re met with poo soaked cloths.

The poo groove, poop trench, or poop highway, as I have called them in my house, gives a direct route from the poop shoot to out of the waste containment device. No matter what you do as a parent there will be those poops (more than you ever care to count) that will jump on the poop autobahn to reach its destination at the back of your kids head. These are especially fun when they are lying down. You simply do not know the horrors which are waiting for you under that happy looking baby. (They are happy because they just left behind a massive load.)

I had to deal with one massive blow out. It was also partly our fault as parents. In attempt to get a bit more sleep at night and to teach baby that night time is for sleeping and NOT watching reruns of Top Gear, the internet said that if the diaper is wet to not change them (because changing a diaper wakes up them up – and in our case it REALLY woke them up). I was up with baby, since the diaper didn’t feel too bad I left it, an hour later they were up again. This time my husband was up with our holy terror, not realizing that I had not changed her and he was running late for work, he also did not change her. Now fast forward two more hours. The fact that she was sleeping meant that I was also sleeping. When she woke up she acted quite happy in her crib looking at her mobile. That NEVER happened, ever so I took that opportunity to do a few things for myself…like you know…go to the bathroom.

After I had taken care of myself I went back into pick her up and start our day. I slid my hands under her to pick her up. Immediately my eyes became as wide as silver dollars, or maybe larger, I don’t know I didn’t have a mirror. I pulled my hands out and blurted out “OH MY GOD!” I then stood there staring at my baby, who was happy as a “pig in shit.”I eventually took a few deep breaths and had to tell myself a few times “you’ve already touched it so just pick her up…it will be okay!” I took on last deep breath and lifted her out of her crib and on to the changing wedge.

My little three week old, 8 lb baby had successfully created such a mess that she soaked through her onsie, through her sleep and play, through the sleep sack, through the sheets and through the mattress pad. The mess was finial stopped by the plastic lining on the back of the mattress pad.

I had to give her a sponge bath on the spot, and I swear she still smelled like poop hour later when a full bath could be drawn, or maybe the smell just got stuck in my nose.

The next major blowout was not a blowout at all; we did have a number of minor blowouts but not to the extent of the previous one. The super secret of avoiding a blowout….cloth diapers, more specifically Fuzzi Bunz!

It was another one of those massive poops, if we had been using disposables the poop would have been all over the place. My husband had the honor of changing the diaper. When he came back into the room and baby had a fresh set of cloths I asked if it was a blowout. He said “no, but there was so much poop I couldn’t stop it from not touching her.”

Oh dear, that’s a massive load.

The diaper held in all the poop, the problem came when taking the diaper off. According to my husband the kid left a “poo butt print” on the changing pad. This is now how we gage the size of a poop, how large of a poo-print it makes on the changing pad.

We have had many massive poops to deal with but with the Fuzzi Bunz instead of poop jumping on the poop autobahn it’s now on a one lane country road stuck behind a combine. That poo is not going anywhere, at least not anywhere quickly.