Babies are astoundingly effective crapping machines. Our adult bowels have been wrecked by stress and thousands of bacon butties, but newborns process their mother's milk with impressive speed, and can expel the residue anything up to three or four times a day.
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| Baby Poop Color Green |
This is the part of the job most dreaded by new fathers. Being male we are naturally more squeamish than females. Our pain threshold is much lower, our physical cowardice more pronounced, and our desire to clean up a baby's shit pretty much non-existent. Of all fathers I spoke to, 89 per cent agreed with the statement 'Changing nappies was the thing I most feared before I became a father.' (This 89 per cent also thought that the other eleven per cent were lying.)
New fathers anxious to impress friends and family, not to mention social workers, will take any opportunity to change a nappy in public to show that they can do it without (a) throwing up or (b) spilling baby cack all over the floor. It could be the most visible rite of passage that new fatherhood offers. It is also, to be frank, a piece of cake. Changing nappies is so much less appalling than you think it's going to be that, in a strange sort of way, you almost end up enjoying it. Were it not for the enormous quantities of excrement involved, you could nearly call it a hobby.
Nature helps in this. There are several discrete phases in the development of baby's shit which ease the terrified father into his new routine. And because it's your own baby, and you are quite well disposed towards it, you won't mind at all. WARNING: Changing other people's children's nappies is a wholly disgusting experience and should be avoided at all costs.
PHASE 1: MECONIUM
This is the baby's first shit, and a striking substance it is. Jet black, with an unearthly green tinge, and as sticky as high tensile industrial adhesive, meconium is essentially the packing for the digestive system that has been used yet. Fortunately it doesn't smell. This is true. You dare not breathe in, in case it's the last time you ever do - but it is genuinely odour-free. Just make sure you don't get it on your clothes. For as placenta is supposed to be delicious if lightly grilled and served with horseradish and a full bodied red wine, so meconium makes an excellent rudimentary asphalt. If you have a driveway that needs doing, and twins, you could be in luck.
PHASE 2: BUTTERY
Meconium smells of nothing, and the cack generated by breast milk smells strangely of butter. Imagine your child's digestive system as a huge chum, with slightly salted Armor Spreadable the natural result. And my word, is it spreadable. Before solids enter your child's diet, excrement is a dangerous and slippery substance that can fill a nappy in seconds. Modem nappy technology is advanced, but even the most tightly fitted Pamper won't keep the full squirt in all of the time. If it doesn't go down one leg, it'll go down the other. And when the baby sits down, any left over will shoot straight up its back.
This will calm down later, I promise, but for the moment you can expect two or three complete changes of clothes per baby per day. Many babies' clothes spend more time being washed than being worn. It is just as well that the cack smells buttery, for if it didn't, you'd probably kill yourself. The extraordinary thing is, you get used to it quite quickly. Honest. Trust me on this. After you have changed 20 or 30 nappies, you will do it so automatically you will notice you are doing it at all. (This is how to spot fathers who never change nappies. They always tell you how much they hate changing nappies.)
In fact - and here's the greatest shock - you may find you quite like the smell of your baby's shit. After all, it is buttery.
It's when this has happened that you realize that you really have become one of those Sad New Dads, who will be boring all his friends with how rewarding fatherhood is, and thus eventually alienating everyone in the whole world.
Formula milk is said to produce nastier shit than breast milk. Apparently it's green in tinge and clears your sinuses like a Fisherman's Friend. But I haven't knowingly smelled it myself, so cannot confirm this. To find out more, you can check out Baby Poop Color Green.