Baby Poo - for parents everywhere, especially my pal Lottie xx

This blog is dedicated to my absolute warrior mummy friend, who, over the last few weeks has been thrown up and shit on several times by her one year old; the worst one being in the middle of the supermarket in front of everyone whilst her 4 year old sat giggling in the trolley. My dear Lottie; this ones for you xxx

Baby poo. The gift that keeps on giving.

When baby is first evacuated from your uterus, they shit out maconium. Lots of it. For those non parents who don't know what that is - imagine trying to clean melted liquorice off a carpet with a Kleenex. That's the level of difficulty we're dealing with here.

Once you get baby home from hospital, they move on to the sweet popcorn smelling, manageable little parcels that as you clean up, you foolishly think to yourself 'I cant see what all the fuss is about, this nappy changing is a doddle.'

You know nothing.

When the midwives come to the house to visit you and baby, the conversation will inevitably turn to baby's poo. The amount, the colour, the consistency. By the time the health visitor came to see us, I had given up with the Bristol Stool Chart and reverted to the take away menu from the local curry house.

Both of my children provided various colours of poo, often several times a day. These would range from the green paste of a Thai Green curry; the red of a chicken Tikka Massala, from the yellow of a korma to an orange so bright I wondered if they had been eating butternut squash and carrots and necking orange juice by the gallon whilst I wasn't looking.

Now, again for the non parents reading, the colour is not the only thing that will shock you. It is the AMOUNT. Where the hell does it all come from?? How on earth can 4oz of milk produce 17kg of shit spread out over 9 nappies?? At one stage I genuinely considered ditching the nappies altogether, laying hay down in the front room and employing a stable boy.

At some point through your parenting journey, you will experience baby's milestones. Their first steps, their first word, their first tooth. All will be worthy of furiously taking photographs and documenting it on social media so that when you go on Time Hop in a few years to come you can sit back and say 'aaaahh remember when....' One milestone that you won't get the camera out for is a pretty big one. It is going to happen at some point, without warning, and it will drive you into a state of panic. No, not your child climbing on the dining room table; not eating the change found in the bottom of your bag, or working out how to climb over the baby gate and escape.

Your child is going to shit in the bath.

Holy. God.

A state of emergency is declared in the house, and you wonder why the fire alarm is now going off, until you realise that it's actually you screaming. Once you have dragged your child out of the bath (who by this point is also pissing himself laughing at the whole fiasco) and handed him to the nearest available pair of hands, you set about retrieving the offending poo. Now, there are several ways to deal with this. If you are old school, you will have a measuring jug from the kitchen in the bathroom to assist with hair washing. This can also double up as a pooper scooper. Also just as effective are the little plastic cups that come with the Thomas The Tank Engine playtime bath set that it suctioned to the side of the bath. You have to negotiate the million and one sodding bubbles that your baby simply has to have before they will even consider entering the bath, and hope that the offending poo doesn't end up between your fingers. Yuck.

Parents everywhere, I appeal to you, DO NOT USE THIS METHOD. There is a much simpler way to de-shit your bath. Unplug the bath, and drain the water. You can then catch said poo on its way to the plughole with toilet roll, and flush it down the toilet. (Unless, of course, you have the same plug as me whereby you turn the little knob at the top of the bath, and it lifts the plug up just enough for the water to get out. The poo will then end up wrapped around the plug leaving you to locate the oldest toothbrush in the bathroom to clean it all off). Whatever your choice, it's gonna be pretty grim, and will lead you to bathing your child in a swim nappy in future.

The other hideous poo you will experience is the mother of all disasters;

The Explosive Poo.

When these occur, your best course of action is to throw the child away and start again with a new one. They are always a brown / green / orange colour mixed into one, and make you wonder if your child has the Tardis for a colon. WHERE HAS IT COME FROM??? However bad the colour, it doesn't hold a candle to the worst offender.....The Smell. Jesus. How can milk go in one way smelling of, well, milk, and come out the other way as toxic waste??

These poos are exclusively reserved for such convenient times as when you've just got baby into the car seat to go out; at their Christening, in a high chair at a wedding (Lottie!!) at the health clinic as you're about to get him weighed, or,  my personal favourite, on your first outing in months to the local pub for a Sunday roast.

Once your child has evacuated the explosive poo from their bowels, you are now faced with the task of cleaning it up. You will notice that your child is dealing with the situation by rolling around in the poo so as to maximise the blast radius. It is at this point that, of course, your Sunday lunch will be served to the table. As you leave to go to change baby, you prepare yourself for the worst place to exist on the planet - the public baby changing room. After gagging at the smell and checking the changing mat for any remnants of its last occupier, you set about cleaning up your little shitting machine. You reach into your change bag and realise that no matter how organised you thought you were, in the excitement of going out for lunch for the first time in forever, you forgot to pack any clean clothes. You will also never have enough baby wipes, so you have to revert to wetting toilet roll and hand towels, which do little else than spread the poo even further like a knife does Nutella on your crumpets.

When you have finally finished cleaning baby to the best of your ability, you then attempt to disinfect yourself and the changing mat with the alcohol hand gel in your bag, whilst checking the label to see if there's enough alcohol in it to warrant you drinking it. You then have to leave the room. You can bet your house on there being someone waiting outside. There is ALWAYS someone waiting outside. Luckily, this is always another exasperated parent with whom you exchange a sympathetic 'fuck my life' glance and try to manage a wry smile and eye roll.

You then have to negotiate your way past the tables situated nearest the changing room (seriously, who chooses to sit here??) whilst muttering a sheepish apology about leaving behind a smell so bad that you would think Dynorod had been to clear the drains out.

Upon your return to your table, your dinner has now gone cold, and Auntie Doris gives you an 'I feel really sorry for you, but I'm so glad I decided not to have children' look whilst asking 'was it a bad one love?' No, Doris. I'm just wearing a Hazmat suit and mask for (literal) shits and giggles. You ask for your meal to go, and catch the manager calling Environmental Health for the raw sewage that judging by the smell is obviously making its way into the pub somewhere. Hateful glances are shot at the women sat knocking back Merlot by the bottle laughing and joking in their child free world, discussing anything but the bowel movements of a six month old. You get your little cherub (who is just wearing a nappy as his knobhead Mum forgot to pack his clothes) out to the car and strap him into his car seat where, yes you guessed it, he has another explosive poo. Fuck. My. Life.

Upon arrival home you juggle your shit covered baby with his change bag and your Sunday roast that will now sit on the side til well after supper time, and set about bathing him. Baby is cautiously washed as you pray to all the Gods that you don't have another bath time poo to contend with.

After you have dried baby off, you put him down in his cot and hope that shit time will be followed by nap time. You are at this stage fully permitted to pouring yourself a pint of wine (a standard wine glass just ain't gonna cut it today) and sit down on the couch to drink away the pain. As you lift your pint of Pinot Grigio to your mouth, you notice that your new top is absolutely covered in shit. Keeping the tags on and returning it to River Island is now out the window. As you drag your arse upstairs to have a shower and de-shit yourself, you catch a glimpse of the baby and see a brown stain on the front. Upon further inspection, you realise you've put him in the baby grow that your mum got him with a picture of a massive poo on the front, with the words:

"Its all shits and giggles, until someone giggles and shits".

Marvellous.