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friday 4th
This morning, coming back from shopping, I put the key in the front door, opened
it and took a really big sniff. I often do this, just to check how the house is smelling (it fascinates
me that you can walk into some people’s houses and it reeks to high heaven, yet they seem totally
oblivious to it, happy to live and entertain amongst the pungent odour of I-don’t-know-what. If my house
smelt like those of some of my friends, I wouldn’t let anyone past the front door. I just wouldn’t.).
It smelt...strange.
I picked out the tang of the scented oil I bought from the Body Shop, after
swallowing some claptrap in Prima or Bella or one of those ladies weeklies, about the importance of your
surroundings having a signature fragrance. Good.
Also the underlying whiff of the mackerel I’d
cooked three days ago. Not brilliant, but at least it has a certain ‘homey’ quality to it.
But
there was something else. Something intensely familiar but that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Something
warm and heavy, sweet yet slightly acrid, that sparked off a vivid sense memory of being very small,
sitting on the kitchen floor of my mum and dad’s house, watching my mum at the kitchen sink doing the
washing up...
Oh my god. I know what it is. Poo.
MY HOUSE SMELLS OF POO!!
It’s that
blinking baby. He’s pumping it out at a frightening rate at the moment, I don't know where he stores
it all. How can so much poo physically fit into such a small child? We have one of those nappy disposal
units, which is supposed to store used nappies in some sort of delicately scented hermetically sealed
state so that they don’t stink you out of house and home, but I suspect that his increased output coupled
with the current warm weather may have caused it to ferment or something. I’m not risking taking a look
though. His nappies have a half life of fifty years, you don’t want to get a blast of twenty or so warm
ones full in the face. I think it would have your eyebrows off.
It wasn’t always so. Mother nature
eases you in pretty gently with regard to babies and faecal matters (or at least she does with breast
fed babies, I’m not so sure it’s the same for bottle fed babies). When they are newborns they poo something
unpleasant called merconium* which is like tar and sticks to your hands and clothes and hair and doesn’t
wash out for days, or so it seems. And there is also the possibility that during the birth itself they
could poo whilst still inside you (it happened on the birthing video I saw at ante natal class. The midwife
delivered this scrawny wailing thing, plastered in black and green slime. She said to the mother, “Would
you like to hold your baby straight away?”. The mother’s reply was a little muffled, I’m not sure what
she said, but I think it was “Not bloody likely!”.). But once they’re a few days only, they start passing
this mustard coloured stuff which looks like bird seed and smells like evaporated milk, like tinned Carnation
cream. It’s really not unpleasant at all. As FT got a bit older, his poo started to smell even sweeter,
like Caramac. Changing nappies became an absolute treat, a little dose of aromatherapy. I would scramble
to be the one to change him so I could inhale the sweet, creamy scent.
Now, at nearly nine months
and with solid food inside him, his poo smells like cattle’s business, and we operate a whoever-touched-him-last-changes-it
policy.
He is growing so quickly now. Yesterday he pulled himself to a standing position against
the side of his cot for the first time. I walked into his room and just found him standing there, nonchalantly,
as though it was no big deal. Soon, he will be walking and I’ll have to start referring to him as a toddler
rather than a baby, sigh...
*I thought it sounded like something out of Superman.
One day one of the nurses walked in to find me flying him through the air, going, “Weeeee, It’s Nappyman!
With his superhuman powers of baby-soft freshness, the only thing Nappyman fears is merconium. And...(dah
dah dahh!)...The Bottle!”
Ahh, we did laugh. Well I did, anyway. I think she saw it as yet another
indicator that I was an unfit mother, on top of the fact that I kept putting his nappies on backwards
and dissolving into tears for no apparent reason.
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