Tuesday, March 17, 2009

What is that?

Those first few hours are generally pretty blissful once baby is born.  You sit there and hold your new baby, hugging and kissing her, smelling her head, calling her by her name, and beaming like every Mother should.

Most babies are so tired that they sleep and sleep, making for a peaceful first few hours.  It seems that you are going to be able to do this Motherhood thing after all, and in no time you feel like a pro.

Once your baby wakes up you make that first attempt at feeding her, and wether successful or not you are still on that new Mom high.  As the first day passes things seem to be going pretty much the way you thought they would.  Even when she cries, you melt and point out "how cute her cry is!"

That was me.  Happy as a clam.  Things were going just the way I had planned them.  I was loving life.  Then... I walked over to change her diaper and what was inside was more than shocking.

A giant pile of TAR.  Was it tar?  It looked like tar!  I knew that my baby was defective!

To say that this was unexpected is a huge understatement.  I yelled for a nurse, who chuckled at me and let me know that this was normal bowel for a newborn.  Meconium.  That is what they call it.  But no-one ever told me about it.  Basically it is made up of Amniotic fluid, bile, and shed skin cells that collect in your babies intestines during pregnancy.  YUMMY!  I was told that after about 12 hours my baby would have more normal looking poop.  And, she did.  But not until she was done passing TONS of this sticky black stuff, that I still say could have been used to tar a road.  Expect the unexpected.  The lesson for the day.

Motherhood is full of surprises, just like pregnancy, and the more you know the less shocked you will be.  My advise would be to keep an open mind.  While Motherhood can be quite blissful, it is also full of tar.  Everyday you will kiss your baby and talk to her, and then the next thing you know she will send a little tar your way.  If you know it's going to happen you are more likely to laugh about it.

Some of my favorite memories are the ones where I was shocked by reality and realized how little I really knew!

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