A little bit of prunes goes a long way

We learned an important lesson this past Saturday: Don't give the baby a full serving of prunes if he seems constipated. We had introduced prunes last week, but he'd never had much, and it was always mixed with cereal. On Saturday we went to Wimberley to visit my grandmother, and I brought along some pears and prunes for E's lunch. He ate those prunes right up! A couple hours later, he was in his doorway jumper, and every so often he'd stop and PUSH, PUSH, PUSH, and then go back to the business of jumping. It was funny, but not that unusual. A few minutes later I looked over at him and he had his back to us and was perfectly still. I barely had time to register how strange that was before I noticed that his left pants leg was suddenly COVERED in shit. TJ and I extracted him from the jumper and soon discovered that we were in uncharted territory. He used to have blowouts all the time when he was tiny, and I don't mean to minimize their craziness, but those were the poops of a breastfed baby. This was the nasty stuff, and it was unstoppable! We were sort of paralyzed, and we weren't at home . . . hmmm. At first we tried to lay him down on his little portable changing mat, but that clearly wasn't going to work--too much poo. I was holding the poor guy out in front of me for what felt like forever while we figured out what to do. We eventually got in the tub and took his shirt off there. Within seconds the tub was dotted with poo and it was smeared on my hands and feet and all over E's legs, arms, hair, and one ear. We got it all cleaned up eventually, and in the meantime, Nana and her friend Ruth sat on the couch laughing.

Nana and her friends had a Sip and See for Eamon back in February, and I was talking to a couple of the gals about having babies close in age and how the thought of that freaks me out. It was Ruth who told me, "Honey, you don't worry about it, you just do it." And Betty, another of Nana's friends, said, "One takes up all your time, so how could two take up anymore?"

They're smart, those ladies.

Here's E, enjoying his prunes.