Award Winning Article: One Million Years BC (Baby Crap)

Local writer and regular Pittsburgh Parent contributor, Ann K. Howley, was thrilled to learn that she won the 1st Place Prize for Nonfiction in the 2016 Pennwriters Writing Contest for her humorous essay, One Million Years BC (Baby Crap).


This is the second time Ann as won the top prize. In 2015, her essay, Milking It, won and will be published in August 2016 in the HerStories Project anthology, So Glad They Told Me: Women Get Real About Motherhood.


Now that Ann has won awards for writing about breastfeeding and baby poop, her two sons are afraid of what she’ll write about next.

Since the first cave mom wrapped a leaf around her cave-baby’s bottom millions of years ago, women from prehistoric ages to modern times would agree with me that the first few years of motherhood is crap. To be specific, baby crap (BC).

So ladies, if you’re pregnant or considering motherhood, I want to warn you. Be prepared for poop.

If a modern day researcher ever wanted to quantify a baby’s average poop production in the first year of life, I predict that ten minutes locked in a small, airless room with a fully loaded Diaper Genie would be all it takes to snuff the technical curiosity out of any scientist. No need to study it. Billions of women can tell you that no scientific advance is ever going to make changing a diaper more pleasant.

The good news is that God has blessed mothers with an extraordinary ability – something so remarkable it defies medical explanation. When a woman gives birth, the neural pathways between her nose and brain go inexplicably haywire and suddenly she can only smell a fraction of her baby’s poop. This might sound like a medical malady, but actually it’s a miracle. How else can you explain the fact that most mothers don’t think their baby’s poop smells too bad?

Without this innate olfactory dysfunction, mothers would be just like fathers, who can’t come within ten feet of their offspring’s dirty diaper without gurgling and gagging noises erupting from their constricted throats. If you don’t believe me, just Google the words “dads changing diapers” and spend the day laughing your butt off watching videos of fathers who have to wear gas masks and Hazmat suits to change a diaper.

Just because God gave mothers an unnatural tolerance to their own baby’s crap doesn’t mean women get off the diaper hook that easily.