Baby Farts (seriously)

My nephew farts like a grown man.  He is just a little over two weeks old and already he can gun them out like he’s gotten into Grandma’s secret recipe for 11-bean broccoli chili.  It is one of the funniest things about him so far.  He farts so loud that the baby monitor noise-o-meter peaks out at the max and sometimes he wakes himself right up out of a dead sleep.  I haven’t laughed this hard in a long time.  Farts, especially loud-ass baby farts of such volume and intensity, are always hilarious.

I’m new to this uncle business, so things like powerful, manly farts coming from a tiny baby are definitely a new experience.  My sister gave me something like two dozen baby books to read (Baby And You, The Baby Listener, Baby Crazy, Crazy Baby, Run Dad!  It’s a Baby!, and other priceless gems).  I read probably ten non-consecutive pages about why breast-feeding is preferable to bottle-feeding and what to do if your baby won’t stop pooping, but after that I got a little overwhelmed.  There was such a vast trove of information out there about how to not screw up your baby and so much of it seemed to disagree with itself that it just didn’t seem worth it to me to try and read it all. Besides, people have been having babies for as long as there have been people around, so tens of thousands of years of uncles not reading baby books is a solid tradition that I gallantly intend to uphold.  It would be historically irresponsible for me to do otherwise.

My plan is to chronicle some of my nephew’s early life in hopes of having lots and lots of blackmail material available for when he becomes rich and famous, or just to mess with him during his senior year in high school and embarrass him in front of his dates.  I’ll try (kind of) to keep his identity a secret and to protect his right to privacy, but you can bet that if it is funny or embarrassing, it will probably end up on this post.  To that end, here’s one more bit that cracks me up:

When he sneezes he sounds like the Count from Sesame Street.  There’s a big wind-up (“ah!  Ah!  AHH!”) followed by an over-the-top delivery (“CHOOO!!”), almost as if he is a woefully under-skilled actor in a community theater production of ‘Sneeze: The Musical.’  His whole entire baby face is contorted with the effort of sneezing and roughly every other time he poops himself right after the sneeze.  I’ll have to try and get some video of him doing exactly that because it amuses me to no end.