Friday, January 14, 2005

Babies, Poop, and Poopy Babies

Big congratulations to my good friend Stephen and his wife Melissa on the birth of their new little boy Logan Wesley, born January 12, 2005. We can’t wait to meet him!

I have several entries floating around in my head, and I keep composing them in my mind, but I haven’t yet had time to put them to paper, figuratively speaking, of course. They will all require a little more deep thinking than I currently have the stamina for. But as teasers, look for upcoming entries entitled the following:

1) Good Stock
2) Woman in Crisis!
3) Do Something Significant

Hopefully listing them here will motivate me to finish my thoughts.

And since this entry started out about babies, I wanted to finish it in the same way. I am getting very exited about the impending birth of Baby Girl Yu (I won’t type her name here, since the Yus haven’t publicly shared it on their own webpage yet). She is due March 9th, in just under 8 weeks. Betsy and I love to talk about all things pregnancy, and we’ve recently started talking about childbirth. Soon we will move our conversations into things like breastfeeding, pooping (more on that in a minute), sleep issues, solids, crawling, walking, toilet teaching, kindergarten, losing teeth, learning to ride a bike, good school systems, braces, smart-mouth adolescents, drivers’ permits, first dates, proms, The Talk, high school graduations, college, empty nest syndrome, weddings, our balding husbands, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, what nursing home we want to live in, and how to get our rooms close together in said nursing home. And when we get there, we will do stuff and blame it on being old. Like, we will fart really loud, and look around like, ‘Did you hear something?’ And wear nothing under our robe, and when it slips open, be all, ‘What? Take a picture, it’ll last longer!’ Because of the strength and longevity of our friendship, I am excited about the birth of the little Princess, who I am Officially Declaring my niece. I have no impending plans of becoming an in-real-life aunt, not anytime soon anyway, unless Kyle plans on taking Austin by storm in some unsanitary and inappropriately-referenced way. So I am dubbing myself Aunt Robyn to Baby Yu. I will do auntly things, things to be determined, as I’m currently new to this. Baby Yu will have plenty of real-life aunts, of course, and one real-life Korean uncle, but I will be the surrogate aunt she never wanted! And when we both move home to B-vizzle, our children will play together and sleep over at each others’ houses, until they get old enough that it becomes inappropriate. They will be more like family than friends, and that’s how we want it. Fosters + Yus = True Love Always.

Now for the promised poop story, and then I must be done. When we were in Gatlinburg, I realized how much of a mom I have truly become, and how much of my life revolves around poop. I’ve heard this many times, and I’ve always been one to check in regularly with my children’s poops, but I’m getting more and more crazy about it. Case in point: [warning, the word 'turd' used liberally ahead] Keith was changing Ari at the hotel before we left one morning, and he said casually, "Ari, that’s a weird little turd in there." I’m like, "TURD?" and all these red lights are going off and I actually hear warning sirens. I’m like a mouse in a maze, trained for this moment. "What do you mean, turd? His poop should be runny, or the consistency of toothpaste, yellow and grainy, nothing solid." Keith’s all calm, and he says, "It’s just a little ball." He continues to clean Ari. At this moment, I realize Keith doesn’t understand the gravity of a solid ball in Ari’s diaper. "He could be CONSTIPATED!" I shriek at Keith, who looks at me like, woman, not now. I demanded to see the offending turd. Keith refuses. He puts the dirty wipe on top of it in the diaper. I demanded again. He refused again, at which point I made a cat-like swipe at the diaper to take a look for myself. This enrages Keith, who feels endangered by the dirty diaper and said-swiping. He tells me to back off, he’s changing a diaper here, and would prefer to stay clean. I reached in again and tried to unwrap the dirty diaper to look at it. Not nice words ensued, maybe a little pushing and shoving on my part. He gives me Angry Eyes and rolls up the diaper and throws it away. IN THE TRASH. BEFORE I COULD SEE ARI’S POOP. How dare he! I was irritated with him for most of the morning after that. Doesn’t he know that Ari could be severely constipated and need medical attention? Doesn’t he know that I gage my parenting capabilities, not to mention breastfeeding, on how much and how often Ari poops, especially after his weird BM problems right after he was born? Doesn’t he know I need to investigate and document each and every stinky, strange thing that emits from my children’s bums? Even if the emission involves whole pieces of carrots?

This is motherhood, Betsy, welcome to it.

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