These stories are grosser than gross, but that kind of goes with the territory of parenting. Getting to know your baby's bodily functions starts from the get-go, as you are soon trying to scrape meconium off a tiny bum or being bathed in your own colostrum. And it doesn't end there. For myself, I'm known as the "Barf Catcher." I've always had the uncanny ability to reach out like a ninja as my children began to do the old heave-ho. I caught so much vomit over the 19 years I've been a mom, and the reflex is so strong, I even tried to catch my second child's explosive nosebleed at the craft store (that didn't end well).
I've also gotten poop everywhere, and I'm not alone. My friend Hurley, who is expecting her second child, told me that her daughter had quite the pooping ability. "Seriously, if we didn't get a diaper on her ASAP after a bath she would poop all over me and everything," she shared.
Liz, mother of two, had a really unhappy experience with her constipated daughter. "I had to help a very hard turd out of my oldest child's bum," she told me. "So gross. Her butt hurt so bad and she couldn't poop and I looked and I'm like, OMG there's a poo boulder in there."
The stories don't end there, although you may want them to. Some moms sacrifice their own clothing to take care of their children's needs. A friend of mine, who has two kids, took off her own socks to clean up poop while they were out because she had nothing else to use. Hurley used her own undershirt to create a makeshift diaper for her child when they ran out while shopping. "Talk about being willing to give the clothes off your back," she quipped. And Liz has used her own clothes, as many of us have, to wipe a child's snotty nose.
Other moms have had the unhappy job of searching through their own child's poop for unusual objects. "Not super gross since poop doesn't bother me much, but I changed my baby's diaper once and was like WTF is that?" said Manda, mom of one. "He pooped out a piece of cardboard packaging with a full barcode on it."
Babies also spit up, and Emily had the displeasure of her 9-month-old baby projectile vomiting… right in her mouth. Megan's baby developed the uncanny ability to spit up right in her cleavage. "It was like her thing," she said. And I'll never forget going to a wedding with my 1-month-old daughter and experiencing a massive spit up down my front. There's nothing quite like trying to appear normal while soaked with upchucked breast milk.
Parenting is a labor of love, of course, which moms and dads prove every time they're subjected to the body fluids of their offspring. As Heather, mom of two, says, "I've been peed on, pooped on, you name it. Parenting is gross."
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