Baby Poop – That First One’s a Doozy by guest author Andrew Kardon

Every mom has at least one good “birth story.” Maybe everything was perfect, serene, and a barrel of laughs. Er, yeah. Probably not. With childbirth, expecting the unexpected is just about the only thing you can rely on. As a dad, I can’t share the actual pain and sensation of pushing a watermelon out of a garden hose, but I can share the entire experience of our first born as seen through my fatherly eyes.

It all started so innocently. My wife was scheduled for a C-section since our baby was breech. And yes, we tried just about everything under the sun to get that baby to move, from subliminal tapes to moxy sticks. No dice. So the day before the scheduled delivery date, we did what most parents would do… we went to the movies and watched X-Men 2. Great flick. Wolverine was even cooler this time around, especially when he… oh, sorry. We’re talking about babies, right? Okay.

So that night my wife and I went to bed and tried to sleep, knowing our entire world, our universe, was about to drastically change the next day. Clearly we were so excited we couldn’t sleep. And then, of course, my wife’s water broke.

After calls back and forth with the doctor (who clearly just wanted to wait until the scheduled delivery the next morning), we grabbed our bag, jumped in the car and drove to the hospital. Before we knew it, our baby was born. A son. Jason.

It was crazy. Surreal.  A whirlwind. And as a typical guy in this situation I was about as useless as you can be. My wife had a wonderfully awful reaction to the anesthesia so was really out of it the first day.  So of course,  that’s when it happened.

Everyone had warned me. My wife had said things. I just didn’t believe it. That precious little pink bundle of joy. The crying machine with those gorgeous deep blue eyes. He finally made his first poop.

Thankfully my in-laws were in the room when it happened, as they were overjoyed as if our son had just hit the game-winning grand slam. “Okay, he finally pooped. That’s a good thing. Let’s see how big this sucker is,” I thought.

I knew the very first poop a baby makes is called its meconium and it’s full of everything that’s built up in this kid over the past nine months or so. And let me tell you, no pictures, stories, or warnings will prepare you for this. Before my in-laws even opened the diaper I could see the damage. My eyes began to widen.

Once that diaper was off, I swear someone poured a few gallons of Hershey’s syrup into my baby’s diaper. There’s just no way that little guy could produce THAT MUCH poop. And not to get too gross on you, but that first one’s more like tar, super dark and syrupy. If I were a cartoon, my jaw easily would have been on the floor at that point.

My in-laws kept laughing at my face as they cleaned up Jason. My wife, on the other hand, was alternating between laughing hysterically at my face, and telling me to “Get the hell out of the room,” for fear of popping her stitches from laughing so hard.

I eventually came to my senses, but honestly, that was a diaper created in the bowels of Stephen King’s horrific mind.

For the most part, everything else went fairly smoothly, and except for the non-stop crying the entire car ride home, we had a pretty normal experience.

I’ll also never forget that initial moment in our house. It was me, my wife, and Jason sitting on the couch in our living room. Well, Jason was probably in my wife’s lap or nursing. The two of us looked at each other, looked around the empty house, looked at Jason,  and then both said in unison, “Now what?”

Meet our guest author
Andrew Kardon is the Daddy at Large over at Mommy’s Busy…  Go Ask Daddy. He’s also a freelance writer, and the president of JoeShopping.com, the friendliest coupons and deals site around!

*image source: mommysbusy.com