Vernix Colostrum Meconium

Here are three words I learned over the past days and weeks, which I can now promptly forget.

• Vernix: waxy white coating that’s all over a newborn’s body as he or she emerges from the womb. It comes not from the amniotic fluid but from the fetus’ own sebaceous glands.
• Colostrum: first milk produced by a new mother, high in nutrients and immunoglobins, low in fat, and mildly laxative, which helps with the next item…
• Meconium: black tarry feces, the first stuff to come out a newborn’s butthole — sterile and odorless and composed of nutrients ingested in utero.

And I’m sure there are many more. I didn’t know there were so many bodily substances I’d never heard of before. But if you chant these three in repetition it sounds like a Satanic Mass.