Baby Solid Food Poop

PHASE 3: SOLIDS 

After four months or so, baby will start eating solid foods and its excrement will change. Less buttery, more foody. More solid. More shitty, in truth. And it will change colour each day, depending on what Junior has been eating. Lots of carrots = orange poo. If baby starts eating meat, the shit becomes as foul and revolting as any adult's. Worse, in some ways, because adult shit rarely gets under your fingernails.

Baby Solid Food Poop

But Mother Nature is a cunning old bird. By the time baby is ingesting solids, you should be so used to changing nappies that you can take the vile odours in your stride. If we had to deal with them at birth, no one would ever change a nappy. Some men don't. Having avoided changing one when the shit smelled of nothing, they find it impossible to make the great leap when it starts smelling of Whiskas Supermeat. 

The learning curve is gentle in the early weeks, but by six to eight months it is the north face of the Eiger. And by then a man who cannot change a nappy is a pitiful figure, liable to be held in contempt by all humanity. When a well-known media chef revealed on television that he had never changed a nappy, the audience hissed. He thought he had done something clever; they thought he was a wuss. He was astounded. He thought all the men, at least, would admire and respect his stance. But he had spent too much time in restaurant kitchens terrorizing minions. Without him realizing it, the parameters of machismo had changed. These days, Real Men Wipe Arses.
 
When you start wiping, you do so with forensic care and a huge amount of kit. Midwives, health visitors and other well informed busybodies will advise that you need the following: a couple of clean nappies; some cotton wool (to clean off the poo); a bowl of warm water (to rinse cotton wool in); a towel (to dry baby's precious arse); a box of wet wipes (to clean it again, this time properly); some talcum powder (to powder precious arse); some zinc barrier cream (to protect arse from nappy rash); kitchen roll (to mop up the terrible atom you have just made); foul-perfumed nappy bags (to put dirty nappy in); three toys and four cloth books to distract baby with; large drink for Daddy to calm nerves. All of which takes so long that baby has probably done another load, so you have to start again straight away.

Two weeks later most of this stuff is in the bathroom somewhere and forgotten. All you really need are the nappies, the wet wipes, a couple of bits of kitchen roll for emergencies and the vital barrier cream. For parents of small babies Sudocrem will become as familiar a word as lunch, dinner or divorce. It's marvelous stuff. It protects against nappy rash, and because it is antiseptic, it cures nappy rash if you forgot to put it on last time. And by now you will be able to change a nappy, even one with crap dripping out of it, in two minutes or less. While talking on the phone and drinking a cup of tea. It couldn't be easier.
 

(Soon you will even be able to tell when your baby is pushing one out. The early buttery poos make wonderful deafening farty noises, but seem to require little effort on the part of baby. But once the solids kick in, baby begins to strain and stretch, grunting slightly as its eyes cross and bulge with the effort of it all. When it's all over, a look of sublime satisfaction crosses baby's face. If you ever see anything funnier in your life you will be very lucky.) To find out more, you can check out Baby Solid Food Poop.

Baby Poop Color Green

SHIT 

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. 
 

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.
 
 

How To Train Baby Potty

Piss, Shit and Vomit
 
BASIL: Words that summarise the first year in its entirety. I soon learned that if I threw out every item of my clothing that had been peed, shat or puked on I would be stark-bollock naked within two months. It was only in my first year of fatherhood that I truly understood what my sister-in-law meant by a "poo-tastrophe'.

How To Train Baby Potty

You don't need me to tell you that babies piss, shit and vomit pretty much all of the time. Food enters via the mouth, but leaves by a variety of routes, none of them predictable. Some babies helpfully look ill just before they chuck up. Others seem to be smiling, and one or two might even chuckle. Again, this may be in your imagination, but one thing is for certain: in 30 seconds' time milky sick will be all over the place. 

At the same moment, the infant bladder being tiny and hyperactive, the baby is almost certainly doing a pee, and may have a shit saved up, too. That nappy could be filling up faster than a Tokyo train in the rush hour. What to do? Where to start? Which cloth to use? What's on TV?

PISS 

Funnily enough, this is not the worst of your problems. The extraordinary sponge-like qualities of modern-day nappies - you could pour most of a reservoir into one without unduly discomforting the wearer - mean that you don't actually have to change them every time baby does a pee. Indeed, you can often wait until the nappy is about the same weight as the baby itself. (If the baby is walking, this usefully develops the thigh muscles, although the noise of the piss-saturated nappy swishing along the ground may disturb passers-by.) 

The big question, of course, is whether to go for disposables, and thus doom the planet, or selflessly use 'terry' nappies, and thus doom yourself and your partner to endless domestic drudgery. For the ecologically minded and rich who live in big cities, there are services that turn up every day to take away dirty 'terry' nappies and bring back nice clean ones. I know people who have looked into this and talked about it very enthusiastically, before buying disposables like everybody else. And if our great-great-great-great-grandchildren end up having to build their cities on vast mounds of undecayed twenty-first-century Huggies, that's just tough.

In early infancy, then, piss is a breeze - it doesn't even smell of anything much when you do come into contact with it. You are more likely to come into contact with it if you have a small boy, whose pee generally travels in a pleasing parabolic arc defined in Cartesian terms by the equation y2=4ax. With a newborn boy the most dangerous moment is when you take off his nappy. The sudden change of temperature activates the bladder, and if you are not ready with a muslin or something to staunch the flow, you will be changing your shirt in three or four minutes' time. Splashes in the eye are not uncommon. One mother I know got a squirt right up her nose.

It's when your baby hits the age of two, and starts potty-training, that urine will really make an impact on your life. On your life, on your carpet, on most pieces of furniture, and on your trousers if the baby is sitting on your lap at the time. Baby wants to pee in the potty. Really wants to. But baby keeps forgetting to ask. And you keep forgetting to ask baby. Then, during the commercial break, the tell-tale trickle down the tiny trousers, necessitating a complete change of clothes and a sizable wodge of kitchen roll to mop up the excess. It's even worse when it happens out of doors. Then the phrase 'piss is a breeze' assumes a whole new meaning. To find out more, you can check out How To Train Baby Potty.

Tips For Discreet Breastfeeding In Public

To this day some experts continue to insist on rigidly timetabled feeds, as part of a programme of rigid timetables. This is a Third Reich view of childcare, concerned only with implementing order. Nurture isn't on the radar. According to one NCT tutor, such experts don't understand that 'breastfeeding is a relationship between a mother and her baby, not just a way to get milk into it.' 
 

Tips For Discreet Breastfeeding In Public

The breastfeeding 'debate' - I'm not sure it's ever quite as civilized as that - is a perfect example of the way parents are bombarded with advice, much of it cancelling each other out, and are then made to feel guilty when things don't work out for them. Of the half of British mothers who give up breastfeeding within six weeks, 90 per cent are said to regret it later. This is the worst of both worlds. Baby doesn't get the goodness of breast milk, and mother beats herself up about it afterwards.
 
By the same token there are experts telling you to demand-feed, other experts telling you to feed to a timetable ... Everyone knows they are right - except the poor bloody parents, who end up thinking they are wrong about everything. The fact is that bottle feeding is never going to do anyone any harm. Bottle-fed babies are not going to get fewer 'A' levels or fail to win Olympic gold medals (well, not because they were bottle-fed, anyway). 

Breast may be best, but bottle is fine. The main disadvantage, of course, is that your workload will be drastically increased by bottle-feeding. Because you no longer have an excuse not to, you will now be the one getting up in the middle of the night to answer the infant's cries. The main advantage is that once milk production has ceased - which happens of its own accord - your access to said breasts will no longer be denied.

Of course, some men actually enjoy bottle-feeding.  

ANTHONY: Astrid didn't find it easy feeding R, and she was back at work after three months so I did quite a lot of bottle feeds with him. We were lucky he swapped between the two at will; so I did a lot of feeds myself, especially when Astrid was back at work. I enjoyed it. Very peaceable. But I was jealous I couldn't breastfeed - honest. 

Did I mention the exploding breasts? I just think it's the most amazing reflex that lactating mums start to lactate as soon as they hear a crying baby. So Astrid's breasts were going off all over the place, even when I was feeding R. Our second one has been breastfed throughout, so I've barely been involved. But now we're in the middle of weaning and trying to get him to take a bottle from me. He's slowly coming round. When he's desperate I'm sure he will.
 
Many parents go for a mixture of breast and bottle, depending on circumstance. There's the issue of breastfeeding in public and to many people it is, still, an issue. Countless times I have been with my girlfriend in public places when she has flopped out a milk-heavy breast for a small child seeking dairy fulfillment. And countless times people have turned and stared. They are often older, with pinched mouths (if women) or pinched beards (if men). 

'There is a time and a place for that,' they appear to be thinking, and may even say out loud. That time is not now and that place is not here. But baby is hungry now and here. Many mothers are intimidated by people's disapproval. Some use bottles to avoid potential embarrassment. I can understand that; what I don't get is why anyone else should disapprove. Who are they to judge? And would they seriously prefer the child to scream its head off, just so they can be protected from the briefest flash of womanly flesh? In this century?

Breastfeeding does change breasts. Firmness is the first casualty. A well nibbled breast will be more pendulous than it might once have been. If I had eaten a biscuit every time a mother has told me that her breasts now 'hang down to her knees', I would now weigh 19 stone. They don't, of course. It's just what they say to taunt and terrify you. After all, unless your breast experience is wide, you may never have encountered post-feeding breasts before. You certainly don't see them in popular culture.

Tilda Swinton is the only actress I can think of who has appeared in a film with bare breasts that have obviously seen baby action. (I saw them in the 2003 film Young Adam. You may well have spotted them elsewhere.) And there's nothing wrong with Tilda's. 

Cosmetic surgeons like to imply that breasts are in some way deformed by breastfeeding and should therefore be renewed by expensive surgery. These people prey on the vulnerable and unconfident and must be resisted, at least until the law is changed to allow us to murder them in cold blood. To find out more, you can check out Tips For Discreet Breastfeeding In Public.

When Do You Start Breastfeeding After Birth

During pregnancy, these previously dormant cells kick into action and the body also grows some new ones. When baby arrives and is shoved on the nipple, the sucking action stimulates the mother's pituitary gland, near the brain, which sends a hormone to the breast: this is the milk order, with a note for a couple of extra pints. The raw material for the milk is already in the bloodstream. I have seen it said that milk is essentially blood without the red blood cells, but that's a rather unappetizing thought.
 

When Do You Start Breastfeeding After Birth

Although not as unappetizing as the milk itself. Go on, have a slurp. Human milk is watery and sweet, less creamy than even the lowest fat cow's milk. (If your baby has a tooth, it will be a sweet one. Newborns actually have more taste buds than adults. As well as the ones on the tongue, the palate, the tonsils and the back of the throat, they also have a few on the insides of their cheeks. Our grown-up taste buds recognize five distinctive tastes; babies' identify only sweetness. Anything else tastes disgusting to them.) 

Curiously, smaller breasts are better designed for feeding than the truly monumental. (I am assuming that the breasts are, indeed, a hundred per cent human breast and not augmented by artificial implants. Porn breasts may be good for male masturbatory purposes but they can be bloody useless as breasts.) Some mothers with substantial (real) breasts report that their baby is "fighting at the breast'. They worry that the baby seems to be resisting the feed, whereas in truth the poor little bastard is struggling for air. 

If your mouth is full of nipple, and your nose is impeded by breast, breathing is always going to be a challenge. All breasts are a combination of fatty tissue and glandular tissue. It's the glandular tissue that feeds babies, and the fatty tissue that tends to enrapture their fathers. If there was only glandular tissue, women would be flat-chested when they weren't suckling their babies - rather like chimps and monkeys. Yet another reason, in case you needed one, not to be a chimp or a monkey.
 
Still, both chimps and monkeys know that the best time to feed your babies is when they are hungry. Until relatively recently this is not what mothers did. For many years, convention had it that babies should only be fed at precise intervals.

Some experts said every hour and a half. Other experts said two hours. A third group of experts, anxious to show their independence from the first two groups of experts, insisted on two and a half hours. After a few weeks, mother and baby would settle into a routine of four-hourly feeds. There was only one problem with this. Baby couldn't tell the time.
 

So when it was hungry, baby would cry. Mother, instructed not to feed baby until 2.45 whatever happened, would have to listen to these desperate wails until the clock clicked 2.45 and the baby got its stomach-full. The theory was that baby had to 'get used' to the mother's regimen, as though it had previously been plotting and planning to overthrow the household like a tiny communist agitator. The result was that baby was made miserable and insecure, and when it finally did get to feed it wouldn't stop feeding, because it knew it wouldn't be getting the milk it would need the next time it was hungry. To find out more, you can check out When Do You Start Breastfeeding After Birth.

Breast Feeding Tips For New Born Baby

When white-bread teenager Debby Boone sang 'You Light Up My Life' in 1977, she was actually referring to God. If a heterosexual man sang it, he would almost certainly be addressing women's breasts. But the notion that such wondrous creations have a function as well as ornamental value, is one of the more startling facets of new fatherhood. 
 

Breast Feeding Tips For New Born Baby

In all our years thinking about breasts, I doubt many of us had concentrated too hard on the idea that breasts of our acquaintance would one day provide the only source of nourishment to a baby in which we had a well-documented 50 per cent genetic share. And yet the evidence is before us, often within minutes of birth. You've had one vast shock - a baby - and here's another.
 
Some fathers, I have to say, don't like it. Having formed an intimate alliance with the mother's breasts, they see their place taken by this greedy little latecomer who appears to have instant access to the precious globes. Indeed, over the next few months, your partner may only ever wear clothes that allow her to whip out a tit at a second's notice, in a way that you may have been trying to persuade her to do for some time. 

Junior has but a small stomach, and becomes hungry appallingly quickly. In public places he or she needs to be latched on in the fastest and most efficient way possible. Only a saint wouldn't feel jealous. Correction: only a dead female saint wouldn't feel jealous. 

Nonetheless, breast milk is one of nature's little miracles, and it can help turn your other little miracle into a rather large miracle. For the first four months a breastfeeding baby will consume nothing else. Current advice has it that you should not introduce solids into the baby's diet until six months, although fashions change so fast in parenting that the autumn season's breastfeeding advice could be completely different. No one, though, argues about the value and general goodness of breast milk. It has everything the baby needs. 

In past generations everyone was told to bottle-feed, as formula milk was a scientific miracle created by huge unpleasant multinational companies unable to charge you for mammary use. It took 30 years or so, but the world finally saw through this. Formula milk was only ever an approximation of breast milk anyway. Why use the fake when the real thing is freely available?
 
This is not to say that breastfeeding is straightforward. It almost never is. Few mothers or babies take to it immediately and without a struggle. There is a technique to learn, which sounds easy enough when you are being told about it at antenatal classes, but can prove problematic when there's a real live baby to feed. If Junior doesn't clamp on right, if the mother is tense (and it's hard to see how she can be anything else), if a hundred small things don't quite work, the whole business can be hellish. 

Sore, cracked and even blistered nipples, blocked milk ducts, mastiffs ... maybe we shouldn't be surprised that more than half of new mothers in the UK have given up on breastfeeding by six weeks. Some are repelled by it, others overwhelmed by it; many just decide it's not for them. As always, respect her wishes. They are her breasts, after all.
 
Breastfeeding is fascinating to watch. Baby doesn't just suck at the breast, he or she clamps the whole mouth over it, creating a suction effect. (Unlike adults, babies can breathe and swallow at the same time.) And there isn't just one big hole, there are lots of little holes. Milk comes out of the nipple as water comes out of a sprinkler. It's common for one breast to produce far more milk than the other: even the smallest baby will soon work this out and start to declare a preference.

 
Note that there is no connection between original breast size and milk production. I say "original' because even the tiniest flea-bite breasts will attain milky grandeur by the time Junior homes in on them. They really are the most amazing piece of equipment. In each breast there are around 20 segments, or lobes, each of which is made up of glands called alveoli which cluster together like bunches of grapes. Each alveolus is lined with milk-producing cells. To find out more, you can check out Breast Feeding Tips For New Born Baby.