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My Baby Is Pretty Gross


Image taken from this article (which is riddled with misspellings but very funny).

My baby's boogers are ridiculous. They're usually grayish or white, so I'm not talking about a sinus infection or anything. She just gets these giant, hard boogers on a regular basis. They're like obstructive boulders that stymie her breathing. I expend a lot of energy extracting them from her nose and studying them on a daily basis. I even call this apparent ritual our "daily booger excavation." I once called it a "daily booger extraction" but those days have long passed. It's truly an operation that requires planning, precision tools, patience, dedication and time. I'm a booger archaeologist, unearthing the remnants of a very recent past from my daughter's nasal cavities.

Recently, baby girl has also taken an interest in my boogers. The other night she was struggling to sleep, so we snuggled. She settled in, stuck her finger up my nose and only then fell asleep.

Her poop has also evolved. Now that she's successfully digested a bit of rice cereal in breast milk and two different kinds of premade formula, her poop is not the hardly-poop-at-all consistency or texture I've grown used to. I've thought about going back to exclusively breastfeeding so diaper changes aren't so gross anymore... I've thought about just breastfeeding her until she's potty trained.

 So I haven't really considered that... or even breastfeeding longer than 6 months, although she'll be 6 months in 2 days and she's not weaned yet. And I'll admit that now that I'm in the middle of the weaning process and have managed to breastfeed as long as I have, I think I better understand the pride that comes along with long-term breastfeeding. Some women seem to breastfeed easily, but for me, it's taken everything I have to give. Doing something so challenging, and managing to do it for a longer period of time than most, is something to be proud of. But real long-term breastfeeding is not for me. The reality is that I must accept her gross poop for what it is. Big girl poop.

And accept that it's going to get worse as we continue our journey away from the boob and begin introducing solids. A whole new world of poop is before us. (And I can't wait to share it all with you! Perhaps I'll get into photo journaling in this next, wondrous phase.)

Along with mature poop comes vomit. Not just spit up - vomit. She doesn't vomit often, but over the past 2 weeks there have been at least 3 separate oral explosions. The good news is that the onset is very easy to predict - she'll slam a bottle of formula, not burp and only then will she puke in my face. I have only seconds before I realize the puke is going to hit my face, so I don't have time to get preemptively sick myself. It's over before it really started, but it smells and it's not watery like spit up. On one of those 3 occasions, she puked all over the nanny. Baby girl likes to share the love, and I was spared that one.
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