Babies are cute and funny and there is absolutely nothing like a baby to make your world a better place. There is also nothing like a baby to make your world a grosser place. Babies can be gross. There, we said it.
The fine print
Here are a few of the nasty things babies do that nobody talks about.
Feeding time at the zoo
Baby food looks bad, some of it smells bad (Ever taken a whiff of baby food meat? It will make you want to become a vegetarian) and even though you are spoon-feeding it to your baby, it somehow ends up everywhere. It gets matted in their hair, crusted onto their clothes and dried on their noses. And when they get old enough to feed themselves, well, all we can say is we hope you have a strong stomach. There is a period in a baby's life when food is one of their favorite toys. They try unique recipes on the tray of their high chair by combining liquids and solids. They smush it between their fingers. They indiscriminately spit out half-masticated food if it isn't to their liking. Babies have no hair, don't care — and the results can be nasty.
Spitting up
All of the aforementioned grossness happens when things are going well with a baby's digestive system. When babies get sick, which some of them do — often — fretful mothers wonder how they are keeping down enough food to grow. Some babies burp up after every feeding. It looks like watery cottage cheese and smells vile, but most mothers just take a deep breath from across the room and clean their babies up as quickly and efficiently as possible. It's what mothers do. Babies spitting up isn't the nastiest thing about this scenario though — the laundry is. Pretty soon your hamper starts to smell like something oozing up from the bowels of hell. And that, my new mothers, is nasty.
Snot rockets
Bless little babies and their gross habits that no one tells you about (because we'd cease to exist as a species if women got an in-depth, accurate visual of what having a baby is really like). Some — not all — miniature humans have a runny nose for the first two years of their lives. You look at these poor little sufferers of this mucus malady and they literally have two constant streams of green goo under their noses. Of course that leads to a whole host of nasty things that we won't elaborate on, in case you're reading this on your lunch break.
Up-the-back poop
If you think that baby food smells bad going in, wait until it comes back out. It's no secret that babies are ticking poop bombs. Poop is an unpleasant side effect of babies, but the diaper/wipe industry has several innovations that make this fact of life a bit more tolerable. What you may not know is that babies literally explode with poop sometimes. We are talking straight up the back explosions. We might be impressed with how much waste such a small creature is capable of producing if it weren't so stinking nasty (pun intended).
Morning breath
When babies are really little they smell pretty good, barring any of these scenarios we've described. That all changes when they get to be about two years old and have a mouth full of teeth. They look so darn sweet in the morning, all groggy in their pajamas with their fine baby hair shooting in every direction. The first thing babies want to do when they get up is snuggle, and what mom can resist that? Be warned though, if one of these morning angels breathes on you, it will not be pleasant. Baby morning breath is the worst. Thankfully, a mother's love enables us to be subjected to this nasty stench without it ruining the morning snuggle.
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