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My husband and I have developed that twisted, new parent obsession with baby poop and baby barf. It's now a large chunk of our conversation, ranking right up there with American Idol and how to minimize our carbon footprint. It's a strange pride, I think, that we share, over the sheer volume, variety and circumstances in which it all happens. It comes out of the baby that we made together, and that makes it the opposite of a "gross out" for us. It's way more fun to brag about it.

We even keep score (unspoken of course) of which one of us has dealt with our four month old baby's best and most extreme poop or barf moments, and are quick to report these particularly impressive occasions to the other for a good laugh. For the record, I'm winning at the moment, with four bum changes and a full clothing change, all during a recent 4 am feeding.

Maybe we've entered a state of new parent dementia, with sleep deprivation finally eroding the last bits of the sophistication and intelligence that we once had, but I'd rather think of it as a new healthy layer to our relationship. It's entertaining. It's love for the baby that we made, and love for each other. We laugh about it. In order to stay sane, I think you have to.

Our baby's poop can be fabulously interesting, and he gives us lots to marvel at. Bright orange to mustard yellow to bright green, sometimes our baby's poop erupts with such sheer force that it makes me wonder if he swallowed my Blackberry, set on vibrate. Other times, it shoots straight up his back like a lava racing up a fault line. Again and again, I am shocked by how much poop can come out of our little one all at once. You can only call it impressive. He's so little, where does he have the room to store that much?

The accompanying noise is fantastic too. I love the surprise on the faces of friends and family when they cuddle our sweet beautiful baby during those special moments. You can hear the action from across the room. I swear we'd get an echo if we lived in the mountains.

If you didn't know any better, you'd think the noise came from one of the adults. The sound is like when your least favourite uncle passes gas after turkey dinner at Thanksgiving. Everyone looks over in disbelief, expecting an apology, but instead, he looks over with that half a smile of satisfaction on his face that you know means "Yeah, much better."

Baby barf is something I knew less about before our baby was born, but I quickly got on the bandwagon for that too. I love how someone somewhere re-labelled baby barf "spitting up" in order to be polite. It sounds so gentle and minor. What comes up out of my baby isn't minor. Most times it's an event and it's rarely predictable. Barf can be our baby's grand finale to a burp right before bed, or come out of nowhere while he's simply lying on the floor. It stinks, it stains things, often there's a lot of it, and it happens all the time.

I used to want to cry in the early weeks when I would get up to breastfeed the poor guy in the middle of the night, totally sleep deprived, my boobs raw and swollen, and following his last burp, up would come what seemed like everything I had just fed him. One time, lying on his back on the floor, head turned to one side, the sheer projectile force of what came up reached as far away as one foot from his face. I was so flabbergasted (but of course, totally impressed) that I wanted to get out a ruler and measure the distance that it had travelled. I resisted the urge, but I will admit that I did get out the camera. I couldn't help myself. I was in awe of my baby, and even funnier, in awe of myself that I was so impressed.

What's even more impressive to us is that despite the volume of what comes out both the top and bottom end of our superbaby, he continues to gain size and weight like a sea monkey on steroids. I guess that's why, with confirmation from our doctor, my husband and I have decided not to worry. We'd rather muse that if pooping and barfing were Olympic events, our son could be the next Michael Phelps. We're right there on the sidelines anyway, and will continue to bust every day with awe and pride.