Oh, the suppository!

Another FIRST, in the adventures of parenthood!  Warning - this is a descriptive post about poop.

Apologies again for my absence... Occasionally I go through periods where I'm embarrassed that I'm one of those people who writes things and posts them on the internet because I have this huge ego and believe that everybody on the world wide interweb needs to hear my story.
Then my friend Ashley asked me why I wasn't blogging anymore.  Then my inflated sense of importance came back, and here I am, as irritating and narcissistic as ever before!

But you want to hear about the suppository, don't you!

Well, for the last few weeks, we've started Angus on solid food.  Well, not exactly solid, as it's usually pureed or mashed beyond recognition, but food different than breast milk anyway.  It started because the six of us would sit down to dinner, and I'd plunk Angus in his exersaucer, and he'd watch us eat, and he'd whine and whinge at being left out.  So I'd pick him up and sit him on my lap, but that made eating one-handed difficult, plus he'd be swiping at everything within reach, including knives and glasses and whatever was on my dinner plate.
We started putting him in his high chair.  His grandma had bought boxes of infant cereal so we thought we'd give it a try.  I guess from watching us eat every night, he knew just what to do!  I don't think eating will be a problem for this kid.  He opens his mouth wide when he sees the spoon coming, gums it for a while, and actually swallows it, unlike some babies who eject the foreign food as soon as it passes their lips.  Afterwards he wipes his face with his bib, then climbs out of his chair and goes and washes his dishes.

So we did this occasionally, trying rice cereal, oat cereal, mashed banana, and pureed carrots.  THEN, one fateful evening about six days ago, we tried STAGE TWO cereal.  And then he stopped pooping.  This was a bit of a concern.  I knew that it was normal for babies to go a while between poops.  But this was not normal for MY baby, who's as regular and predictable as the church bells on Sunday...  The pharmacist also told me yesterday that doctors usually have no problem letting a baby go ten days without pooping.  TEN DAYS!  Can you imagine how ten days of NOT pooping would feel?

For five days, wherever Angus went, a green haze followed.  The smelliest farts you could ever imagine.  One night, Aaron actually went to sleep on the couch, after having his nose hairs burned off and suffocating from these rotten fumes.  (Angus is still in bed with us - NOT by our choice.... that's another story.)  It got to the point where even Angus's PEE even started to smell bad, which I began to think was because none of the toxins in his body were being released anywhere else.
So off we went to see a pharmacist, who informed us that we would have to insert something in our poor little baby's bottom.  Aaron and I looked at each other, horrified. 

But the end of this story is actually pretty anti-climactic.  The suppository involved inserting a little stick of glycerin in Angus's bum (which was a lot less horrifying that we'd thought it would be), then holding his bum cheeks closed for a few seconds.  After this I put five diapers on him, then wrapped him up in plastic, covered myself in towels, and then nursed him.  I didn't even notice that he'd already pooped!  Normally everyone within a two-block radius can hear this child pooping, but this one was silent.  I was expecting some kind of nuclear bomb, but to my disappointment, it was just a normal, albeit silent, poop.

The end.

The moral of the story is - pooping leads to happiness.