The photo that will make every parent laugh and every non-parent sick.

BY CARTER GADDIS

In one black and white photo, the father’s smiling face gazes serenely at the camera, an image of pride and joy as he cradles his sleeping infant son in his forearms like a football. The naked baby’s gangly arms and legs dangle, his little head pillowed comfortably in the palm of his dad’s hand.

Image via Kristy Grant (the Dad Network.)

The chaos that ensued an instant later — as the baby pooped — reminded Al Ferguson that the hazards of handling a sleeping, naked newborn are very real, and very messy.

“It happened within a second,” said Ferguson, a 26-year-old blogger from Kent in the United Kingdom. “As I felt his stomach tense, in the back of your head you know he’s about to go poo, and then before you know it … he’s doing it.”

Image via Kristy Grant (the Dad Network.)

Photographer Kirsty Grant somehow caught it all in pictures that have gone viral: the little smile on baby Ted’s face, the sudden shock as dad looks down, the projectile stream coating dad’s arm on its way to embedding itself in the shag rug in the Ferguson family sitting room.

“It’s not the kind of carpet that can be cleaned particularly easily,” said Ferguson, who stood in shock as the remnants dripped off his arm. “But the photographer did an amazing thing — she reached down for a nappy, picked it up, then went to put it over Ted’s bum to stem the flow. And she still got the shot.”

Grant was laughing, Ferguson said, along with his wife, Jen. Dad was more concerned with the rug, but he recognised the humour later and wrote about the incident for BabyCentre UK, as well as his own blog, the Dad Network.

“These baby photos are becoming a bit more of an art form,” Ferguson said. “Not just an art form, but also a demonstration of photography skill, something that you’d want to put on the wall.”

On the wall? Sure. As long as it doesn’t end up on the carpet first.

This post was originally published on Today and is republished here with full permission.

Have you had a similar experience with your newborn?  What has gone wrong in your newborn photo shoots?