So, it’s early in the morning and I am ankle deep in poop in my kitchen, when I have an epiphany…. I HATE POOP!!!! I don’t just hate it, I loathe it. It is not my friend,my bestie, my compadre. We do not share warm and fuzzy memories. We have a past littered with trauma and anxiety ( and lots of Rockin Green Shake It Up!!!). Perhaps I should explain.
Typically when people come into the store for toileting issues, they end up with me, although if they knew how long it actually took us to do it, they might rethink my advice. My son took 3 long years to toilet train! We did have extenuating circumstances, but really, three years, really? I began to train when he was just over 2 years old, and started showing interest in others going to the bathroom. I took him out and let him pick a potty which then spent the next year in a lonely corner of the bathroom collecting bathroom dust (you know, the stuff that you can’t just wipe off, you kind of have to scrub …). By this time we had advice coming out the wazoo from “friendly” neighbours and relatives, sprinkled with veiled comments about how so and so was trained by 12 months. Clearly THEY were MUCH better parents than I was….
We had tried everything, stickers, rewards, treats, nothing seemed to work and we had NO successes to praise so I wasn’t even sure he understood what he was supposed to be doing. Then it dawned on me, that this was all related to anxiety, and perhaps he COULDN’ T use the toilet. He was suffering from Encopresis, a disorder which results in soiling of the underpants when toilet trained, and occurs in boys more frequently than in girls. There are varying causes, from a phobia of toileting (that was us), to constipation issues, up to and including behavioral issues.For more info please visit http://www.indiaparenting.com/babyhealth/data/bhealth20.shtml
Now that I knew what the issue was, you would think that it would be easier to solve, well, you would be wrong. Even after figuring out what was going on, I still had no idea how to progress. So my “Supermommy” senses told me to take all of the pressure off ( when everyone else was telling me to put more on!!!) and establish toileting as part of our everyday routine. The idea was to desensitize him slowly and in small ( seconds) increments, gently working our way up to sitting happily on the toilet, and eventually using the toilet. Well, we did it!!! It took us three years but we accomplished it, and now at the age of 5 we are mostly toilet trained!!! ( barring accidents caused by illness on my kitchen floor)
So needless to say, you may understand why I am not a fan of the poop. Although thank God I found the Starbunz Superundies http://www.bellylaughs.ca/item.php?item_id=829&category_id=82 with the snaps, they may well have saved my sanity!! Nothing however, could save my kitchen floor!!!!
