Pooping is a very complex series of events that one has to get used to! It requires contracting specific muscles while relaxing others. If your baby grunts, squirms, or turns red when pooping, that does not necessarily mean your baby is constipated. This is a very common mistake new parents make. Constipation is not defined by how your baby looks or sounds when pooping or even the frequency of the poops. Poop that looks like small rabbit-like pellets, hard logs, or marbles usually means constipation. ConstipationĬonstipation is when your baby has hard stools. If you’re concerned your baby might have diarrhea, especially while you’re figuring out what “normal is,” you should check with the baby’s doctor. The problem when you have a newborn is that you don’t know what “normal” is yet!ĭiarrhea can be from an infection, food intolerance, medication side effect, or simply from swallowing extra saliva or snotty mucus if your baby is teething or has a cold. So if your baby goes more frequently than usual, or the poop is more liquidy than normal, that’s considered diarrhea. The key indicator for diarrhea is a change in your baby’s regular stool pattern. Parents often have difficulty defining diarrhea for a baby, especially in the early days when every poop looks like what you would call diarrhea for an adult. You can even see pieces of undigested food in the poop this usually freaks out new parents but is normal. The color also changes and often reflects the color of the foods they ingest. It becomes smellier and thicker, trending more towards the poop of an adult. Once your baby starts eating solid food, not just drinking breast milk or formula, the stool drastically changes. The poop before they’re eating well and gaining weight is a transition from meconium to the traditional breastmilk or formula poops. By days 3 to 5 of life, though, your baby should start gaining the weight back. We usually expect them to lose up to 10% of their birth weight. Babies don’t eat much in the first few days of life, and most lose weight during this time, which is also normal. This is something between the thick dark meconium and the softer stools from breast milk or formula. Any shade of yellow, green, brown, or orange is also normal. The consistency is similar to peanut butter. It’s often more green or brown and slightly darker than breastmilk poop. This poop tends to be thicker than breastmilk poop. But any shade of yellow, green, brown, or orange is normal. Sometimes newborns poop with every feed, which can be up to ten times per day! It is often very watery because it is so easily digested. Newborn breastmilk poop is very liquidy and frequent. This is the only time that truly black stool is okay for your baby or, really, for anyone. It can occur during delivery or usually within 36 hours after. It’s the result of everything your baby’s gastrointestinal tract accumulated in utero, including old blood, which gives it that true black color. Congrats, new parent! Meconium is a sterile, thick, tarry, black-green, odorless poop. This is the first poop your baby will ever have. 1 That’s nearly 1,000 poops! So here’s the scoop on 12 types of baby poop and what they mean. That’s because babies poop an average of two to three times a day for the first year of life. New parents spend a lot of time looking at, talking about, and cleaning up poop. But this is a very different kind of obsession. There might not be any other time in your life that you’re more obsessed with poop than when you become a new parent! Okay, maybe middle school was a close second for some.
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