9 Month Old Got Into His Own Poop: Do I Need to Worry, and What Do I Do Next?
It was 2:17 on a Tuesday, I remember, because I’d just checked my work calendar 2 minutes earlier and breathed a sigh of relief that I had 20 whole minutes before my next call. My 9-month-old, Jax, had woken up from nap 10 minutes early, and I was folding a pile of his onesies on the couch just outside his bedroom door. It went too quiet. Too quiet for a baby who’d recently learned to bang two blocks together hard enough to make your teeth hurt. I peeked around the doorframe, and there he was: sitting cross-legged in the middle of his crib, sun streaking through the blinds over his shoulders, grinning so wide his two bottom teeth stuck out. Both of his hands were covered in poop. There were smears up his forearms, a streak across the crib bumper, and a faint brown thumb print on the ear of his favorite stuffed duck.
I dropped the pile of onesies I was holding. I’d changed him right before I laid him down, and I had no idea he’d already figured out how to peel the Velcro tabs off his diaper. I inched toward him, trying not to react, and that’s when I saw it: a tiny smudge of brown right at the corner of his mouth. Panic hit me instantly. Did he taste it? Did he eat some? I fumbled my phone out of my pocket, backed out of the room to keep him from crawling after me with poopy hands, and called my cousin who’s a pediatrician. She answered on the second ring, and I was rambling so fast she asked me to slow down. When I got the words out “my 9-month-old got into his own poop and I think he touched it to his mouth,” she laughed. Not a mean laugh, a tired, “oh this again” laugh. She said she gets at least one call a month about this exact thing from first-time parents.
First, she walked me through the immediate health stuff, which is what I was panicking about anyway. Yes, poop has bacteria, but it’s his own poop. Most of the time, even if he ingested a tiny bit, the worst that will happen is a little loose poop in a day or two, if anything. What I needed to do right then: wipe his mouth out with a clean wet washcloth, give him a sip of water to rinse, then get him straight in the tub. For the next 48 hours, just keep an eye out for a fever over 101, persistent vomiting, or really watery diarrhea that doesn’t clear up after a day. If any of that happens, call your pediatrician. Otherwise, it’s just a really gross mess, not a medical emergency. That was a huge weight off. I was already mentally packing a go bag to head to the ER.
Then we talked about why this happens in the first place, because I was convinced I’d messed up somehow. I thought maybe it was a sign I was leaving him alone too much, or that he had some weird behavioral issue. She said no—this is just straight up normal developmental curiosity. At 9 months old, babies are just getting really good at using their fingers to manipulate small things: diaper tabs, snap closures, the buttons on your shirt. They know there’s something inside that diaper, it’s a new texture they haven’t felt before, and when they get it open, of course they’re going to touch it. It’s not misbehavior. It’s not a sign he’s ready to potty train early. It’s just a baby doing what babies do: exploring every single thing in his world, even the messy, gross stuff. That made sense, once I thought about it. A week before this, he’d dumped out his entire bowl of oatmeal on the floor just to stomp in it. Texture play is his whole thing right now.
I got Jax in the tub after we got off the phone, and he splashed around like it was the best playdate he’d ever had. I stripped all the bedding out of the crib, washed the stuffed duck on the hottest setting the washing machine would go, and threw the cloth crib bumper away. It was already on my list to get rid of anyway for safety, and the poop had soaked all the way through the layers. I scrubbed the crib slats with disinfectant three times, and there’s still a faint brown stain on one edge of the hardwood floor by the crib that won’t come out. I ordered takeout that night because I had zero energy left to cook.
After that, I messed around with a few little tricks to prevent it from happening again, and none of them were fancy or expensive. The one that worked best for us was putting Jax’s onesie on backwards. So the zipper or snaps are on his back instead of his front, and he can’t reach around far enough to unzip it yet, which stops him from getting to the diaper tabs in the first place. When he’s in loose pajamas, I just throw a cheap pair of snap-side training pants over his diaper for an extra layer he can’t get through. I also started heading in to check on him right when he wakes up from nap, instead of trying to sneak in 10 minutes of work or laundry. I keep a pack of heavy-duty wipes and a clean hand towel propped right by his bedroom door, just in case I need to act fast.
It’s been almost a month now, and we haven’t had a repeat poop incident. Jax has moved on to new messy hobbies: pulling all the board books off the lower shelf, chewing through the charging cords I forget to move, and dumping his entire cup of water onto the rug right after I clean it. That faint stain on the hardwood is still there, and every time I walk past it I laugh. When you’re a first-time parent, every weird, messy thing your baby does feels like a crisis. You sit there panicking, wondering if you’re doing something wrong, if this means something terrible. Most of the time, though, it’s just a messy, gross, completely normal step in having a 9-month-old. If it happens to you, you don’t need to panic. Wipe the baby down, get him in the tub, throw the really gross stuff away, and order dinner out. There will be a new mess to deal with tomorrow, anyway.
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