The work of the child's excretory system
Changes in your child's stool. Be prepared for the fact that your child's chair will gradually change its color from black through green and brown to yellow. For the first few days, the child's chair contains a black, resin-like, sticky substance known as meconium, which consists of the remains of the amniotic fluid found in the intestinal tract of the child. Your newborn baby should have a meconium stool in the first twenty-four hours. If not, let the doctor know. Toward the end of the first week, your child's chair will become less sticky and change its color to a greenish-brown one. After two weeks, it will turn a yellowish brown color and a more usual consistency.
Benefits of breastfeeding.
The stool of children who are breastfed is different from the stool of children receiving artificial feeding. If you are breastfeeding, after a week or two, when your baby gets more fat milk coming in at the end of the feeding, you can expect his chair to turn yellow, grainy, like mustard. Since breast milk has a natural laxative effect, the stools of breast-fed infants are more frequent, softer, more yellow, and have a completely unpleasant smell, like curdled milk. In a child receiving a bottle, the stool is usually less frequent, firmer, darker, greenish and has an unpleasant smell. Although the chair of a newborn baby is usually mustard yellow, it's okay if suddenly there is a green chair, provided that your child's general health is normal.
How often. The number of bowel movements per day varies considerably among different newborn babies. As noted earlier, children who are breastfed tend to have a stool more often than children receiving the mixture. Some children have a loose stool after or during each breast-feeding. And mothers often hear the gurgling sounds of a liquid stool, barely beginning to feed. A watery eruption from time to time( the so-called explosive stool) is an ordinary matter, and should not be confused with diarrhea.(If you have concerns, read about diarrhea and signs of dehydration.) A newborn baby who receives enough breastmilk usually has two to five bowel movements a day, but can only be once a day, which is normal. Sometimes a child may not have a stool for two to three days, which is normal, but usually this does not happen until the age of one
or two months. Insufficiently frequent stools in an infant under two months of age usually indicate that the baby is not getting enough thick, "long-distance" milk.
Blood in the stool. Sometimes a child has a hard stool or a sudden explosive( gushing) stool, resulting in a small rupture of the rectum, called an anal fissure. If you find several points of bright red blood on the baby's diaper or a streak of blood in the stool, the cause is likely to be a crack. It is easily healed by lubricating the rectum of the child with non-prescription children's glycerin suppositories( candles), which are previously cut along in half.
Changes that occur with wet diapers. In , the first week of the child's urine is completely unconcentrated, like water. After a few weeks urine can acquire a more concentrated, amber-yellow color. In the first week, your newborn can normally have two or three wet diapers a day. After that, prepare for the fact that your child will wet at least six to eight tissue diapers a day( four to five disposable diapers).
Why is urine reddish? In the first week, you often have to face several orange or reddish spots on the diaper, which can alarm you because they look like blood. These red spots are caused by urates( uric acid residues) normal to the newborn's urine, which give orange-red spots on the diaper.