Baby Cute

The word "baby" is synonymous with "cute". If one is baby faced, they are young, fresh and cute looking, Who amongst us can look at baby feet or hands without an "Aww! How cute." escaping us? And big baby eyes...come on! So you'd think that "baby fart" would be right up there. All the benefits of "baby" with all the comic genius of "farts". Well, you know what? They aren't cute and they most certainly not funny at all...they are the trumpeting herald of abominable foulness!

Sure, I laughed the first time I heard one of my daughters toot. My wife giggled from her hospital bed at the funny little sound; something like an over ripen tomato being thrown against a wall. But the matronly amongst us went straight faced and the nurse on shift just turned and fled the room. I should have recognized the look on some of the faces. It was one that I'd seen many times before in old monster movies...the look that the villagers get when they have to choose a sacrifice to appease the creature terrorizing their island. But I didn't catch it...I only had eyes for my babies.

We had been told in our pre-natal class to open just one of the tabs, and peer through the opening to verify the condition of the diaper before beginning a change. Truly, I was not ready for the horror of that first peek. I now understand the definition of "pant load". I instantly feared that the garment had been designed to small to contain the roiling ocean of black goop that now inhabited my daughter's diaper. Looking at the contents, my first thought was that I had not been given a newborn human at all, but that my daughter was some sort of machine, now leaking a viscous, sticky oil. I later found out that the substance is called meconium, and that it is a perfectly normal product of babies only a few days old (it's made up of amniotic fluid, mucus and other goodies ingested in utero) and that it paled in horror in what was to come.

In the past few days I have learned to fear the baby fart, I no longer find it funny (unless someone else is holding one of the girls). By far the least amusing time to hear this almost cartoony noise is in the middle of a diaper change, when you are at your most vulnerable. I am very seriously considering renaming one of my daughters Crap Fountain, based on her ability to defecate with the force of an ever-flowing tube of toothpaste, stomped upon by a heavy booted man, each and every time I remove her diaper. Her sister has earned the name Crap Shotgun. I felt an moment of pride just prior to being pelted by buttshot, at my baby's ability to calculate trajectory (that's high school level calculus right there) given only the angle of her back to the change pad and the height her legs. At least the warning bark of breaking wind allowed me to close my mouth before my face was splattered.