There are many things you may not fully understand until you have a baby. Here are three recent discoveries of mine:
Dumbo is trippy and racist. Don’t get me wrong, scenes like this are positively lovely and make me weep. And I love this one about how babies arrive. The problem comes when you’re all snuggled up with your toddler and the crows start talking:
Dave and I had already furrow-browed, squinted and head-tilted our way through the horrifically trippy “Elephant’s on Parade” scene. But this black crows business made us downright uncomfortable; we just kept glancing to the TV, at each other, and back again with wide eyes and WTF faces.
How did I go my whole life without knowing Dumbo’s crows are racist? How does a movie with such hurtful content win an Oscar? (Well, it was 1941, sigh) To tell you the truth, I’m sort of traumatized by the whole thing. Next time Suzianne needs a Disney fix, we’ll be peeping out Cinderella.
Poop is a totally acceptable adult conversation topic. When you’re preggers, folks warn you that you’ll be talking about poop a lot. They don’t explain that you’ll be talking about–and comparing–poop color, smell, frequency, texture, hardness, and velocity with your friends, neighbors and complete strangers, and that none of that will seem odd to you.
And when you and your spouse talk about how the baby’s morning is going, you will hear something like:
Spouse: She’s good. But her poop was a little dark. At first, I thought it was black (panic- inducing) and so I was going to wake you up and have you look at it. But once I held it up to the light, I saw that it was only dark green (not-panic-inducing).
You: Must have been all those blueberries she ate yesterday.
You’ll also discover that if your child is regular, that is to be celebrated because you’re one of the lucky ones. Some babies are constipated, or simply refuse to poop. This means that when you invite their parents over for drink, they’re often forced to say no because their baby is “in mid-poop.”