Let's start by noting that there will be no photos to accompany this post, a fact for which you should be profoundly grateful. Because the subject today is poop, and specifically what happens to poop when your cantankerous (but loveable!) eight month old starts finally eating her solid food. Here's a hint:
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWW.
Lemme set the scene: Erin is about to go running with her pal Sara. Josie has just finished a meal of sweet potatoes and oatmeal. It's about 1800 hours on your average Monday. All day long, Erin and I have been playing a game called Diaper Roulette, a game familiar to cloth-diaper-using parents the world over. To wit: we have been trying to figure out when Josie plans to, uh, clear the pipes, as it were, so we can have a disposable diaper on her, because, despite our best efforts with the cloth, leakage is pretty much inevitable.
But Josie, in her own mischievious fashion, has been fecally withholding for the past twelve hours, a pattern that Erin and I recognize as perhaps more suspenseful (to us, anyway) than any film Hollywood has released in the past 20 years. To make matters worse, she's been offering somewhat grewsome sounding eructations.
Now, just as Erin is preparing for her run, I take Josie out of her high chair and start playing a game with her that I call Where'd the Baby Go? the rules of which are that Josie stands on my lap and I suddenly pretend to fling her over my shoulder while shrieking Where'd the Baby Go? at the top of my lungs. Yeah, we're into pretty sophisticated parenting here in the Lower East Side (of Arlington).
Anyways, you all know where this is going. Josie LOVES this game. It makes her giggle and coo like crazy, because she's one of those kids who loves being scared, and loves especially (apparently) having the shit scared out of her, which is what happens. After the third or fourth fling, she's standing on my lap and she gets that unmistakable look of intestinal concentration -- the knit brow, the crimped cheek, you know the drill -- and suddenly the muted sounds coming from her backside are, well, liquid in nature.
At least partly liquid in nature.
I know this because I immediately hurry Jos to the changing table, noticing, as I hold her leg down to prevent her from kicking me in the teeth, that her chubby little calflet is covered in something...
Okay, so no panic. I can handle this kind of thing. I immediately do what all responsible fathers do in such circumstances: I holler to Erin for help. She walks in and makes what would turn out to be a very wise decision, namely to be the parent who holds Josie's hands, rather than the one who pulls her pants down.
I'm going to tread lightly here, because if you're reading this, chances are you have your own loads of misery to face each day, and don't need your snouts rubbed in mine. I do feel compelled to note a few words of the dialogue that ensued. (Please keep in mind that I'm editing...)
Erin: Ohmigod! There are chunks!
Babydaddy: Please just hold her hands down. Please.
Erin: But it's, there's, she's never had chunks before!
BD: Solid food, hon.
Erin: And that smell! It's never smelled like that! My God, our baby's growing up. Remember when her poops were just these little sweet-smelling things?
BD: They were never sweet-smelling.
Erin: Yes they were! Hey, you missed a spot, there's--
BD: Where?
Erin: Behind her knee?
BD: Here?
Erin: In the fold. No, you've got to into the fold...
That's about enough to give you the flavor. The bottom line here is that my wife -- not a terribly sentimental person (particularly compared to me, the Human Cheeseball) -- wound up mired in nostalgia at the sight of our daughter's first solid bowel movement, while I wound up simply mired.
This is by way of offering thanks to all of you who gave us awesome suggestions for getting the solid stuff into Josie's gullet. The one that worked best, by the way, was handing her a spoon to play with, along with promising that if she was a good girl and ate all her cereal, and got the timing just right, she would soon be able to Hot Carl her father.
