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Gather Round As 13 Parents Share Their Worst Poop Stories
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Every parent I know has a horrifying diaper blowout story. They are the tales we tell around the proverbial campfire to delight other parents, the yarns we spin to frighten our child-free and expecting friends. Because when a night out costs double what it used to (#babysitters) you learn to make your own fun.
Look, everyone going into the parenting business knows they're in for a small mountain of poo for the next couple years. But the truth is, you can't really know until you're actually elbows deep in your infant's 10th diaper of the day to realize, before now, you didn't know sh*t about sh*t. You didn't realize how different baby poop is from adult poop or how much mental energy it would require to constantly deal with it. You didn't understand how you would ever get used to it, but somehow, in time, it barely fazes you... until the day it does. The day of your diaper story. This is no run-of-the-mill diaper. This is a diaper that chills the blood of an experienced poop-handler. And while it's absolutely horrifying in the moment, it always, ultimately, makes for a really good story... and blackmail for when your child becomes a salty teenager.
Here are 13 parents with their very best poop-tales.
Talia
"I am driving in the left lane on I-95 in Virginia (during a 10-hour drive) when I look in the rear-view mirror and notice the boy giggling and smearing chocolate all over his face. It literally takes me a good minute before [I think] ... what chocolate is he playing with ? Where did he get it from? Then the light bulb clicks on! Oh sh*t! It's sh*t! At that moment I swing the car at full speed across four lanes of traffic to get to the shoulder and of course, with my luck, cut off a Virginia State Trooper in the process. He had his lights flashing and he is fuming. I jumped out of the car and ran to the side where the baby was and just looked at the mess. The trooper is now out of his car yelling me and I mean yelling. Something about unsafe, no signal, blah blah, but I’m staring at the baby through the car window which is now completely smeared in doody. He looks in and says in his Southern drawl, 'Ma'am, there is a gas station at the next exit with a hose, have a good day.' And just like that he was gone."
Michele
"This one time my daughter, maybe 3 at the time, figured out how to get her diaper off. So one afternoon, while she was supposedly napping she was actually having a ball in her room. And by 'ball' I mean 'a ball of sh*t.' She took off her diaper with this big load of poop in it and decided it would be the absolute funnest thing to play with. After smearing it all over every surface she could touch she decided her babies looked hungry, so she fed them. Poop. She shoved it in their little mouths so well that a bleach-filled pressure washer wouldn't have cleaned them out. Then I guess her Barbies decided to go hiking down the mud trail and play in it while they were there. We lost a lot of good dolls that day."
Allison
"My 2-year-old pooped in his pull-up during his nap, so he tried to clean himself with three packs of baby wipes (didn’t quite do the trick), leading to also getting poop on himself, his carpet, bedding, and clothes. So he then took out all the clean bedding from his closet and tries to change the sheets. Now there’s just numerous soiled sheets and pillowcases all over his bed. Then he takes out a new pull up and change of clothes and attempts to put it all on top of his poopy self."
Emily
"My family and I were staying at a friend’s one-bedroom apartment, and my husband had just dropped my son and me off while he went to a work event. My son locked us out of the bedroom, which is where the only bathroom was. After a couple hours of trying desperately to unlock the door to use the restroom, I put on a diaper and peed in it."
Veronica
"I went to [a] park with my husband's family. It was a horrifically long drive ... with a 3-month-old baby who hated car seats. So she was already grumpy. Of course she needed a diaper change when we arrived. I had the trunk set up as a changing station and when I began, a poo ball fell out of her diaper and started rolling down the parking lot. I had my mother-in-law hold onto her while I ran after a piece of poo that would not stop rolling. It went a good 40 feet before I caught up! That's why I tell folks, if I can chase my daughter's poop down the street to pick it up, y'all can pick up after your dogs."
Lindsey
"When my brother was about 11 months old he dropped the stink-nastiest poo while we were waiting to get on the monorail between Magic Kingdom and Epcot. My parents were out of diapers and didn’t have anywhere to change him, anyway. The smell was so bad that people would walk up to the door of our car — empty except for us — then immediately turn and walk away. He spent the whole ride happily crawling around the train, completely oblivious to the nuclear meltdown going on in his pants. He’s turning 27 this month and I can still vividly remember the smell."
Emmy
"My son pooped through his diaper during his christening, while wearing a family gown that was 80-years-old. It was ruined. It couldn't be washed; it would have fallen apart. So we stood up there at the altar in front of about 100 people with me holding him so no one would see the poop on the gown, which meant getting poop all over my dress as well."
Beth
"Last night my just-turned-2 kiddo yelled 'Cookie cookie!' while playing in the tub. I figured out what she was talking about a fraction of a second after she grabbed a giant floater and fortunately a fraction of a second before she ate said 'cookie.' I wish there was a diaper in this story."
"Eve"
"My daughter had horrible constipation for the first few years of her life. When she was about a year old, she had not gone in several days and she had a large impacted log just stuck in there. We had tried Miralax and prunes and apple juice and had called the pediatrician. She suggested a particularly interesting method using Vaseline. It worked! The large impacted log started coming out! I was cheering. She was grunting. Yay! Only, not yay. That impaction was the cork bottle holding everything in. Once it was out, there was a fecal apocalypse. It shot out and went everywhere. All that Miralax and prunes had made everything behind the log very loose. My poor cat was in the line of fire. It was a disaster."
Kimmie
"One time, a little black ball rolled out of my daughter's poopy diaper. It was an intact pea that had gone all the way through her little system. I know because I foolishly squished it with my finger."
Susan
"There are many but probably the one that stands out the most is the time my youngest exploded out of his diaper all over our couch. But when we went to take the covers off the cushions to clean them, we discovered the inner panels filled with down were ripped. So it was a feather-filled sh*t explosion in our living room. Hours later, we were literally throwing our couch away. By sheer luck, friends of ours were giving away their couch for free because they bought a new one! So all worked out for us — rough in the moment though."
Another Erin
"The day after we brought [our daughter] home from the hospital, she had a massive blowout. Poop all over her, all over me because I was holding her. We attempted to change her. We were brand-new parents and didn’t know how to get her onesie off without getting poop on her face, so we cut it off with scissors. We bagged the diaper and clothes and put it on the floor by the changing table. We were working on getting her cleaned up and not paying attention to the diaper and finished up only to find that the dog got into the poop bag and was dragging the disgusting diaper all over the floor, so we also needed to mop the floor and give the dog a bath."
"Alice"
"My son's first poop came when he was probably five or six days old. He had pooped in utero and on the way out so we never had the meconium poop. So you can imagine that his first poop was epic. My husband was so ecstatic about the size ... that he went running out of the room to get his camera. His gleeful reaction made me laugh so hard that I started peeing because of that total lack of postpartum bladder control. So now we had a fountain of poop coming out of our son and a fountain of pee coming out of me. Lots of cleanup."
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