The Trixie Update

Conventional wisdom states that babies can’t be toilet-trained until they are at least 2 years old. The reasons given for this range from the psychological to the physiological, with most agreeing that the necessary reflexes and muscle control take that long to develop. This is total crap! Trixie undertakes pooping with unbelievable precision. Since we starting giving her solid food, she so far refuses to do it while she’s wearing a diaper. Without fail, she decides that the best time to take a poop is right after I’ve taken off her diaper.

I’m torn on whether this is a convenient behavior. So far it has meant we haven’t been caught off-guard when traveling around town. But on the homefront it makes for an unbelievably trying — though predictable — routine. First, buck naked from the waist down, she has to grab her feet and pull them back as far as she can — if possible into her mouth. Second, secure in the knowledge that she is, in fact, naked, she gets right to work.

After throwing down an open diaper, I stand by and watch the horror of it all. There are so many terribly vivid metaphors. Some days I imagine a Play-Doh Fun Factory. Other times it’s a soft-serve ice cream machine. Less abstractly, it reminds me of catching an unlucky glance at one of those yippy dogs out in the park doing their thing. The latest challenge is the unfortunate discovery that my gag reflex almost isn’t strong enough for the job. The smell a couple of days ago brought me within a hair’s breadth of actually throwing up. This is bad because nobody wants to throw up on their baby.

Why subject myself to this? Why not quickly seal up the diaper and run when my spider-sense starts tingling? Because it’s actually easier to clean up if it doesn’t get smushed all around the diaper. Even a light poopy diaper can necessitate a bath if it gets smeared around too much, and that’s 10 times the work. So, this is the best we can hope for under the circumstances. More importantly, I’m convinced that she knows exactly what she’s doing. Toilet-training starts tomorrow.

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The squash has worked its way through Trixie’s system. Up until this point, we’ve been extremely lucky when it comes to Trixie’s poop. First of all, when a baby only drinks breast milk, the poop is pretty innocuous. I’ve discussed it here on the site before. It’s a wacky yellow-orange mustard color and, while it does smell offensive, it’s usually not that overwhelming. Secondly, it not uncommon for breast milk fed babies to go days without a bowel movement. In Trixie’s case she would regularly go 2-3 and sometimes 4 days without a poopy diaper to clean up. It was one of the bright spots in the world of diapers. Well, we can kiss all that goodbye.

Now that she’s eating real food instead of super-refined breast milk, she’s crapping real poop. And it’s every bit as disgusting as you might imagine. It’s kind of like stepping in a giant pile of dog shit, except that it’s not on your shoe, it’s smeared all over your baby. And instead of happening occasionally when you make a false step at the park, it’s going to happen in your house everyday. I seriously can’t believe that toilet training is ~18 months away.

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Trixie pulled a new trick on us in the bathtub last Thursday. About five minutes in, we catch a fleeting expression on her face and then watch in initial confusion as billowing, mustard-colored clouds rapidly spread throughout the water. Like an octopus or squid employing an ink screen in self defense, I think her plan was to disappear behind the plumes of poop, but alas, the bathtub was neither large enough nor deep enough for her to escape. We had to start the bath over from scratch at that point because the situation was about as sanitary as if we had just rinsed her off in an unflushed toilet.

[A note about baby poop: It’s a liquid. Milk-fed babies do not ever have solid poop (until they switch to regular food.)]

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There’s really not much more to say. Well, actually, let me clarify (in order to head-off the confused and incredulous emails in my inbox), Trixie did not use 600 diapers yesterday, but rather exceeded that number cumulatively.

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What were you doing 10 a.m. September 13th, 2003? We were changing Trixie’s 500th diaper. 500 diapers. Five Hundred. Trixie hit this milestone on her 44th day in this world. I shouldn’t be surprised, because I knew she was averaging more than 11 a day leading up to that point. Still, it’s shocking to see such a large number. And that number will, of course, grow into the thousands by the end of the first year. Even if she stabilizes at 6 diapers a day starting today, we are looking at 2,448 by 7/31/04. At 8 a day it will be 3,072. If the average climbs to 10 a day, it will be a mind-blowing 3,686 diapers before she even turns one year old.

You get better at changing diapers, but it’s an evolutionary struggle. She’s constantly growing and requires more milk which leads to an increase in the scale of waste. And just as a balance is struck in managing these changes, she’s grown into a new diaper size and you’re temporarily back to square one.

However, all things considered, life has gotten easier as the number of diapers that cause major laundry or clean-up problems have proportionally decreased. These “Hassle Diapers,” which can be either poopy OR wet diapers that have spilled out, can be seen leveling off when compared to the cumulative diaper totals [see above].

On a monthly scale the diaper hassle picture is constantly improving. But the “Cumulative Diaper Totals” chart is misleading because on a day-to-day basis the development hasn’t been nearly as smooth or predictable. The true on-the-ground picture of the diaper struggle is messy, erratic and random [see below]. This daily time-series reveals improvement, but details the setbacks and relapses along the way.

The trend that becomes evident in “The Diminishing Diaper Hassle” chart is that it’s not the number of diapers that matters; it’s the amount of inconvenience involved. You can change 15 diapers in one day, but if nothing leaks or spills out, it’s not that big a deal. Conversely, you could have only 5 daily diapers, but if each one explodes all over the couch, you get a little worn down. Eventually, the blue area should whittle away to nothing, marking the point that diaper duty becomes an invisible, non-issue. This almost occurred for a single day on both September 5th and 12th, when there was only 1 diaper rated “Hassle” on each day.

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Some astute readers have inquired about the drop off in poop-related reporting. Is Trixie no longer perpetrating the acts that solidified her reputation as an excretory terror? In short, the situation is a lot better due to several different factors. 1) She doesn’t go as much as she did — therefore less opportunity for disaster. 2) We’ve gotten smarter. We can usually recognize a potential accident before it happens. 3) She finally has a butt. This probably carries the most weight. So many earlier accidents were the result of the poop and pee leaking/shooting/streaming/flooding right past her tiny, bony, little rear. Now she has some booty, and the diapers fit 10 times better. Regrettably, in spite of all these improvements, incidents like this can still occur [see below].

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I’m inclined to use strong language to express my displeasure with the cute little bundle of crap that is crapping and peeing all over the house. Poop is a family-friendly word that parents use to chronicle their newborn’s exploits. But really — stronger language is needed here when she manages to defile so much in such a short time.

First, her diaper, her blanket and couch again. Then her diaper, her nightgown, the blanket, the pack-n-play sheet, the bath towel under it followed by the changing pad, two cloth diapers and a wash cloth. This is during a one hour period while we’re already doing a load of her soiled everything.

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Somehow she managed to torque her body in such a way that it’s as if she’s wearing no diaper at all. She’s extremely pleased with herself.

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Trixie surprised us once again this morning when we woke up to warm puddle slowly spreading across the sheets.

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I’m going to take a minute here to talk about the character of poop.

Baby poop is a very curious thing. Her first several poops are the sticky, black meconium — the stuff that accumulated in her body while in utero. It’s messy stuff. Basically it looks like someone smeared a tube of oil paint in her diaper. But a little bit of turpentine gets it right off.

Next up is brownish, smelly poop, which I understand is caused by the digestion of blood that was accidentally swallowed during birth. It’s not pretty, but it’s not outrageous. It’s pretty much what one would expect poop to look like. It makes more sense than what comes next.

I was wholly unprepared for the Day-Glo mustard-yellow surprise we discovered in her diaper once the breast milk had completely worked its way through system. It’s insane. It looks exactly like French’s Mustard even down to these little seeds sticking to everything.

My explanation is that breast milk is like 99% high octane fuel and Trixie is an amazingly efficient engine. The fuel is so pure and burns so clean that there’s almost no waste, just a residue of pure pigment.

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