soft serve

If I would have written this blog entry an hour ago the titled would have been "since Thursday," referring to how long its been since Eddie last pooped. I was all prepared to share with the blog followers how perplexed we've been for the last two days because Eddie is usually pretty regular with one bowel movement a day. He has only skipped a day here and there. I know from my readings that breastfed babies don't always have a bowel movement every day and some only have a couple a week. But you would think with the introduction of solid foods he would be producing more waste, not less. The last couple days we have fed him 3 meals a day, an increase from the 2 a day he has been on since hitting the 6 month mark. His meals are basically 1 ounce servings of food. Over the past three days he has eaten barley (the new food I introduced on Thursday), banana, avocado, sweet potatoes, pears and brown rice. So the only thing I could attribute the supposed constipation to was the barley...which is strange because whole grains, as water soluable fiber, are supposed to be good for creating "bulk" in one's diet.

Anyway, so I had just put him down for a late afternoon nap and he was having difficulty falling asleep, or so it seemed. I could tell by the noises he was making that he was on his back, which he cannot fall asleep on. So I went upstairs to flip him over. When I opened the door and walked in, I smelled poop. But it could have been coming from the diaper pail...no, I knew it wasn't because we just emptied it Friday and he hasn't made a poop since then. Then I check his butt and yes, it smelled like poop. Now I must explain that so far Eddie's poops have not really smelled much - this is typically the case of exclusively breastfed babies' stools. But of course with the introduction of solid foods, we knew that the smell would start to change and resemble...well, poop. So I took him over to the changing table and, alas, there was poop and it in no way resembled the poops he has created before, except for maybe the color (still mustard yellow). It was thick, like creamy peanut butter. And then as I was whipping it away from his tushie, I noticed more suddenly appear from his butt, coming out like soft serve. Yes, soft serve is the best analogy I can use to describe it.