urggghhhhh!

‘urrrrggghhh’
‘it’s ok – just relax....breath’
‘urrrrghhh’
Much sobbing ensued as poor Nipper tried again in vain to pass poo, and I’m not talking about the yellow hairy variety with an appended ‘h’.

‘It’s ok sweetheart.....it’s just Hooman Pooski – the pesky Russian poo’.

I can’t actually trace the day it started, but I’ll admit; it’s disturbing when you start to anthropomorphise things, especially nasty, foul, stinky things. But since Nipper had started to pass, what I described to the Dr as ‘human poo’s, it seemed soothing to give them a name so that once deposited in the bin we could grin and say; ‘Good riddance to Hooman Pooski’. The Nabokovian character had a couple of brothers who’d joined Nipper’s nursery, but ‘Colonel Fartski’ and ‘Professsor Vomitski’ were less troublesome than Hooman Pooski who was really very good at reducing Nipper to tears.

We took Nipper to see Dr C this morning and she prescribed laxatives. It’s disturbing to give your one year old something you’ve seen your Grandad imbibe, but Dr C said it would be good to do for a couple of days to break the cycle. I really hope it does break the cycle as the pair of us have been cradling Nipper and rubbing her back and belly and popping her into unorthodox yoga positions for weeks now, just to aid the poo release.

All this talk of poo seems so natural now that I’m a mum, but thinking back pre-Nipper, I don’t think I EVER had a conversation about excrement. Now though, I go through the motions with anyone who’ll listen. My knowledge of poo could rival a bedpan wielding nurse and I can now talk poo better than the dreaded McKeith woman.
It’s no surprise that you get obsessed by the stuff; one of the first things you do as a mum is acquaint yourself with it. It started the minute Nipper popped into the world, and to be honest It’s quite fascinating. The first few days of poo were black as soot. This stuff went by the space-age name of ‘Maconium’, and sounded to me like something Superman might be familiar with. We then embraced the ‘chicken korma’ phase, which seemed to last for about five months. With the addition of solids to her diet, Nipper began to reveal her full armoury; perfect cylindrical balls of poo, as beautiful as gem stones were followed by nappy explosions full of chemical waste.

Sweetcorn, raisins, carrots and even a whole lentil have been observed in the poo; because, here’s the thing; I can’t help myself from having a good look. I’m a nappy-reader; a skewed fortune teller who’s eschewed tea leaves in favour of the brown stuff. With the help of some sweetcorn, this morning, I’m sure I saw the face of Boris Johnson. I had half a mind to email his PR and tell her I thought Boris was in the sticky brown stuff (again), but then decided against it.

If the Dr’s gloop works its magic, then apparently things will get much easier. We’ll use a lot more nappies (and the dustmen will refer to us as The House At Poo Corner) but at least the tears will stop. Hopefully by this time next week Hooman Pooski and his mates will have left our house for good and the only tears associated with poo will be those caused by the yellow-hairy one kamikaze-diving out of the crib in the middle of the night.