Baby Blog

I am writing this blog in the aftermath of a major mommyhood trauma. I am hoping by writing out my experiences immediately I can avoid any long terms effects such as chronic PTSD, depression or rocking back and forth next to the toilet gagging.

Baby Nik just ate his own poop. And being my darling little wild man, it was no polite nibble. Here’s the scoop on baby’s poop.

We were potty training. Nik had removed his diaper and I placed him on the potty. He had a fit, a tantrum if you will as my son thinks he is a two year old and he has already used the potty once and doesn’t see the point in doing so again. I showed him his bag of rewards and he informed me he wanted a car but he wasn’t going to stay on the potty for it. He ran off naked as a jay bird just as his father came through the front door.

By my estimation only a few seconds, maybe twenty, had elapsed since Nik had run from the potty. I heard him pretending to eat something in the hallway as he talked to his dad. My brain clicked into gear and I came flying out of the kitchen to be traumatized by the sight before my eyes.

My husband thought it was a chocolate rice krispie treat.

Baby Nik was holding his own poop with one hand and gnawing at it as he visited with his dad (who, was still totally oblivious).  As I put everything together, I grabbed a paper towel and scooped the offending odorous object from my son’s sticky hand and ran to the bathroom to flush it. During this time my husband (finally!) put two and two together and then all parental trauma broke loose.

My husband held Nik at the bathroom threshold, arms akimbo so he couldn’t touch anything as I ran a bath. Baby Nik continued to chew on the remaining morsels of his own feces. I tried getting him to spit it out but he laughed and refused. It was all a game to my little darling and I wasn’t about to dig it out of his mouth.

As my husband and I continued to exclaim in disgust and I tried to hold down my lunch, he washed the kid and I searched for the rest of the mess.

I found it in the middle of my Berber rug and looked in horror as it went from the center of the rug in a smeared trail to baby Nik’s battery operated Spiderman car. I still don’t know how he managed to get so much of the stuff in all those nooks and crannies that fast. I cleaned and gagged, scrubbed and dry heaved and thought to myself: “I’m too old for this poop.”

Being the cyber savvy mommy that I am, I cleaned up the wreckage and got online to find out what sort of issue I may be facing and how normal the whole baby eating poop thing might be. Besides laughing at the many many stories, pediatrician’s notes and suggested advice, I couldn’t believe how many actual articles existed on the whole poop debate. Hysterical and certainly helped me relaxed after my trauma.

I of course hit the mom to mom help websites and found other parents that had been through similar incidents. All agreed that the pediatrician would say not to worry but keep an eye out for bacterial infections or tummy troubles. A little extra fluids that day wouldn’t be a bad idea either. But then I came across some great advice from someone who obviously was far from a first time mom.

“The best you can do is take a deep breath and realize that if eating poop is the worst thing that ever happens, than your doing pretty good.”-Bodhimom

Yep. That’s what I’m going to go with too.