[ring, ring]
“Child Care, this is Emily.”
“Hi, hi, [frantic] my child ate poop! Do I take him to the emergency room?”
“Excuse me, ma’am. Just a moment. [push hold button] Guys, I think this mom just told me that her child ate poop!!”

Turns out, I heard her right. Her little 1 year old chose to have an afternoon snack straight from the diaper. You can imagine how much this grosses me out. I did some research tonight to see how abnormal this is. As I thought, it’s not the best idea or the healthiest idea. Here are some bizarre facts about poop.

You’ve always wondered why bird poop hits your windshield and it’s white, right? Well, it works like this. Birds don’t urinate. Their kidneys extract nitrogenous wastes from the bloodstream, but instead of excreting it as urea dissolved in urine as we do, they excrete it in the form of uric acid. Uric acid has a very low solubility in water, so it emerges as a white paste.

Here’s an interesting bit that I learned in college: very few people can actually digest corn. When we chew corn, the outer coating slips off the inner kernal. This outer yellow coating is almost entirely cellulose, and is indigestible. It passes through the gut untouched, and emerges looking like a whole kernal, although it is mostly just the outer skin. The inside of the kernal is starchy and digestible, and that is the part that we succeed in chewing up.

I found this on a website:
Q: “My Shihtzu has a habit of picking her poop up off her poopy pad and carrying it somewhere else in the house and hiding it. The vet told me this is some sort of protective maternal thing that spayed female dogs do. But the real problem is my toddler now copies the pooch and is carrying his turds in his mouth and hiding them under his bed. Should I be worried about this behavior, or do you think it’s just a phase?”
Dr. Adams responds: “I am actually horrified that someone could be stupid enough to ask me this question!
Let me make sure I am clear here. You are asking me if I think you should be worried about your toddler carrying dog feces in his mouth???
“First off, the fact that you could ask this question indicates to me that you are not fit to be a parent and pose a danger to the health and well being of your toddler. If you came to me in person and actually asked me this question, I would call the police and have you arrested for child abuse.”

For some more interesting poop facts, check out this site: http://www.heptune.com/poop.html

I will be keeping a close eye on my children to make sure that I never have to call the doctor’s office for such problems. I honestly hope that my children have more fascination with dirt.