Parenting problems they failed to warn me about.

[rivka]

A pigeon crapped on my baby.

Alex and I went out to lunch with my friend from childbirth class, Emily, and her daughter Zoe. We walked up from Emily's house to Cafe Hon, a Baltimore home-cooking institution with meatloaf on the menu, homemade desserts, and middle-aged waitresses who got all googly-eyed over our babies. I had a magnificent shrimp-salad sandwich and a piece of carrot cake, but only because I didn't know until after Emily's dessert arrived that the hot fudge sundaes are made with homemade fudge. We ate and talked and compared babies, and then wandered back to Emily's.

I set Alex's car seat on the pavement while I folded the stroller and put it in the trunk, and then bent down to buckle her in. Just as I finished buckling the straps there was a sudden splat. A pigeon crapped on my baby.

"Did that really just happen?" I heard myself say.

"One pigeon," Emily said. "There was just one pigeon in the entire sky."

Fortunately, the carseat buckle caught almost all of the mess - although the little shorts from Alex's dress-and-shorts set also got slimed. I grabbed her hands to keep them clean and asked Emily to get the baby wipes from my diaper bag. I kept laughing hysterically, and Emily kept apologizing for the behavior of Hampden pigeons. Alex was nonplussed. We came on home and told Michael all about it, and he washed the carseat straps with disinfectant.

Because a pigeon crapped on our baby. My mother never warned me about this.

Comments

[fairoriana.livejournal.com]

Thank for the heads-up about this danger facing our nation's children. I appreciate the warning! I wonder if they sell poop-repellant strollers...

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

Ha! Definitely the funniest thing I've heard so far today. :-)

-J

[lawgeekgurl.livejournal.com]

in italy that's considered a sign of good fortune! a gross sign, but still!

[tsjafo.livejournal.com]

Into each life... *grin* I'm glad the buckle got the brunt of it. What are the odds? Maybe you should have bought a lottery ticket!

[witling.livejournal.com]

Oh, man. That's hilarious. And it's also good luck, so good for Alex!

[king-tirian.livejournal.com]

How horrible!

Of course, the other disaster is that the we're not going to pass along the old Vaudeville jokes to the next generation if we don't use them when the time is right. "Baby wipes? Don't bother, the pigeon is probably long gone by now!"

Don't say you weren't warned.

[richtermom.livejournal.com]

Well, this calls for some other stuff you want to be warned about.

As soon as she starts crawling, she will beeline for dogfood in your house or any dog-containing residence. And in the back yard, she will look for poop to squish in her fingers and possibly try to eat.

She will eat sand by the cute chubby baby fistfull.

And she will go through no fewer than three different weeks where every time you put her in the tub, she will have a bowel movement.

Anyone else want to share?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I would certainly hope that most strollers were poop-resistant. I was under the impression that poop-resistance is really the primary measure of quality in child paraphanaelia.

[ratphooey.livejournal.com]

Perhaps pigeons only crap on the very best babies.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Not to be overly paranoid, but do check in with your pediatrician soon, because contact with pigeon droppings is a way in which meningitis is spread. That's why meningitis is relatively common among the homeless, who have a hard time avoiding contact with pigeon droppings.

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

I have to say that my reaction was to laugh out loud. Poor Alex!

MKK

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I'd like to say that she's gotten her Obligatory Birdshit Experience over with, but it's really too early to discern a pattern. Inductive reasoning may come into play later. (Given the meningitis thing, I will certainly hope for no experience n+1, though.)

[rivka.livejournal.com]

A quick Google suggests that this is only true of fungal meningitis, not the more common forms of bacterial or viral meningitis. Fungal meningitis typically only occurs in immunocompromised people, which probably includes a lot of homeless people but doesn't include Alex.

Alex has also been vaccinated against meningitis. But that didn't keep me from getting moderately freaked out last night. My father suggests that salmonella would be a more likely result of pigeon exposure in an infant, but since she hasn't gotten sick and since she didn't have any skin-to-dropping contact, I think she's okay.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Yes, but only the most enterprising of manufacturers consider the possibility that the poop will come from high above the baby.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I would assume that many infants are quite resourceful in where they can apply poop, even without columbine help.

[zencuppa.livejournal.com]

Sorry, all I can do is laugh :-)