Moment of the Month

I'm not sure how, but Claire has managed to top her last moment of the month.  Although she has been technically potty trained for 6 months - she only goes in the toilet and can wear underpants all day - she still has some issues to work out.  Big ones.  I won't go into the frustrating details, but basically she has a fear of letting her caca / poop out.  She holds it for as many days as she can before it forces it's own way out into the toilet.  She has been on laxatives for a long time now, so it doesn't hurt, it is just all in her mind.

At her 2-year pediatric appointment, her doctor advised us to take her Miralax up a notch, so we did.  Apparently a little too much.  But it wasn't until we were at a party that we found out that the new amount of laxatives worked very quickly.  Our good friends, the Keunes, invited us to a "Low Country Boil" at their home in Seattle, basically the southern version of a barbecue, but cooking everything together in one big pot.  As soon as we started to take our first bites of the delicious meal, Claire's urges began as usual and she wanted to go hang out on the toilet.  After 20 or 30 minutes in there, she decided she was finished trying and wanted to return to the party.  I thought I would ease her stress by having her change into a pull-up so if she felt like she needed to go, we could at least tell her to go in her pull-up.

5 minutes later, her pull-up was full.  This was the first time she had ever gone caca out of the toilet for the last 6 months, so we were already impressed and I was glad I brought that pull-up along.  We changed her back into her pull-up thinking the potty issues were done for the day.  But Claire had something else in mind.  15 minutes later, I was talking to someone at the gathering with Claire bouncing around behind me.  I heard Jason's voice, "Uh, Jen - she has to go again."  Then I noticed him focus in on her with a look of shock.  There was runny caca flowing out of her underpants and plopping out of her dress onto the grass!

Claire was completely unbothered by it as we pulled off her now messy dress and underwear and tried to keep her from spreading her trail even more around the yard.  Keeping the other kids off of the territorial markings was not an easy task.  Luckily, one of the many people we met that day had a very large 10-month-old that had a diaper we could put Claire into and she spent the rest of the time running around nearly naked.  Classy.  I took a photo of Claire's trail in the grass, but it was too disgusting for me to post.  I hope some very nice flowers grow up on that fertilized plot.  Jen & John were very accommodating hosts and humored our troubled family.  They may never let us inside their home again, introduce us to their friends, or have their own children following this incident, but they kept smiles on their faces nonetheless.  And now we have lowered Claire's Miralax dose to something she can handle.

On a related note, remember the Fred Meyer play area incident?  We returned for another attempt this week.  I made sure Claire emptied her bladder first and I was happy to see that the child supervisor was different than the one who witnessed Claire's last moment.  But Claire refused to go inside.  She just kept saying, "No pee pee in the play area.  Pee pee in the toilet."  For months, she (and I) could not wait to go and now, thanks to the negative association, she has zero interest in returning and would rather travel the store aisles with me, trying to reach anything she can off the shelves as I maneuver around.  Fabulous.