I tell you what, poo isn't a subject that's going to be easily exhausted.
It's hard to be exact. Is poo inherently fascinating? Or am I so inundated with it that I perforce find it fascinating, in the way that an old lag spending too much time in solitary might find the cracks in the walls intricately beautiful? Or is it just my baby's poo?
I had a great chat with my brother a few weeks ago. No! That can't be right, a few weeks ago the baby was still a bump. I mean a few days ago. Probably. Time is a little slippery at the moment. I'm as likely to be asleep as awake at any given moment of the day.
Anyway, chat with my brother. He has a baby daughter who's one and a half, and we were exchanging anecdotes about nappies, as one does with other fathers. "Quite cute, though, the wee poos, aren't they?" he said.
I am lost in wonder every time I look at my daughter. Both my wife and I are very much in the throes of the creepy staring stage, where we spend hours on end gazing raptly at her from about six inches away. Luckily she'll have virtually no memory of this later, as we get in early on proving Philip Larkin right about parents and their proclivities. If the first thing you saw every time you woke up was my owl-eyed, bearded face cooing at you from its perch on the end of your nose, I'd give you a month before you could do nothing more than issue chilling howls and rock back and forth.
With that in mind, however, I do not think I could consider the wee poos 'cute', exactly. Inoffensive and reassuring at best. Seeing a healthy poop in the nappy soothes my frantic worries for a moment or two, at least until she does something else terrifying. Like breath. Or move. But not cute. I want to cuddle cute things. I do not want to cuddle poo.
They were abruptly green last night, altering from the saffron cottage cheese look they're supposed to have to something like jellied pea soup. Sorry if you're eating either of those right now, I didn't mean to spoil them for you. Although I doubt I could, where are you buying these bizarre luxuries? M&S doing another new range for jaded sybarites?
Much consulting of Dr Google later, this turns out to probably be a side effect of inefficient eating. Apparently breast milk is a three-course meal, with a thin gruel to start and a rich cream to finish. Without the rich cream, your baby cannot make enough of the right enzyme to break down the milk, and the mint sauce poop arrives. No wonder kids love desert so much, it's actually good for them.
As with every other alarming revelation, the ones that every fresh second bring us, this has cost us another night's sleep. Must. Feed. Better. was the order of last night, both of us fretting over head position, amount of time spent suckling, pressure to surface area ratios of burpy back pats, all that kind of technical panic. I'm peering into the nappies like a scatological David Bellamy, rooting about in search of that precious golden poo that tells us all is well again.
It was all pointless, Baby is fine and eats what she wants when she wants and is loving all the attention. Net result - more poop.
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