I'm A Poop Doula

"I'm a poop doula", I thought to myself as I picked up the phone to tell Arvind, "Ajay had a big poo and it was nice and smooth." Naive mom, checking in again. I had no idea how much thought I would have to put into my baby's bowel movements. Time, frequency, texture/consistency -- you name it, I've had to log it. No pun intended, haha.

Ajay is an interesting pooper (I am sure he will thank me for this post later in life). When he was first born, I heard he had the meconium poops -- they are black and tarry. The reason I say that I heard he had them was because I did not change a single dipe in the hospital, it never occurred to me. The nurses said he was pooping fine and that he had to get the meconium out so that he wouldn't get jaundice or something like that. Well, he was jaundiced anyway, despite our best poop efforts.

Another interesting thing I learned about newborn poop was that breastfed baby poo has a more pleasant smell than formula poop. Hmm, nice to know, considering we planned to exclusively breastfeed, we get the pleasant poo. After the meconium, comes the seedy mustard poop. I swear it looks like diarrhea, but we were told not to be alarmed with the consistency. He had seedy mustard poos that looked, literally, like seeds in the diaper. Someone please explain that to me. Then, we had cottage cheese mustard poos fairly regularly in the first 4-6 weeks. I'd say maybe 3-4 times a day. Then he slowed down to about twice a day for a couple of weeks. The poos were still runny, though. The just after his 8 week check-up, he was every other day. And finally, from about 8 weeks to 16 weeks, my boy was a once a weeker. Let's talk about this for a second. When he was only going once a week, the poos were still soft, so he definitely was not constipated. In fact, you can read all over the internet that it is very common for exclusively breastfed babies to poo only once every 7-10 days. Common? Looking back, I think we got lucky.

Then, at almost 5 months old, when we started solids we got to see firsthand what constipation was. He ate all the bananas and in no time he was backed up. He had to strain and strain and strain and what he produced was, well, interesting. First, it was shaped like a hamburger patty, but colors varied between yellowy banana color and some greenish color to almost a tarry black - it was speckled. I think it looked like a crab patty. Mmm, chew on that. So, we had to stop the solids and give him some prune juice and finally get things going again.

Well, he still gets backed up on a fairly regular basis. Which is why I like to think of myself as a poop doula. First, I had to wonder when he was going to poop because he was only going once a week. Now, I know he is going to poop, but I have to check consistency and texture. Nowadays, when he gets constipated, I can tell, because there really are little hard pebbles coming out and I get so excited when he has a nice, giant, soft poo. Oh, what my life has become and I wouldn't trade it for the world. Well, I guess I gotta go -- there's probably a diaper that needs changing around here.