Poopy Problems

Abbie's potty training is coming along well. I'm confidant that she's progressed to beyond the point of liquid accidents. When she's doing something fun like watching Dora or watching Diego,* she knows to hold it. That way she can release it while she's sitting on the potty to stay clean, or occasionally she releases it when the television goes off to express anger. Either way, it's an intentional release of liquid.

Solids are a different matter. She still has no idea how to poop in the potty, or how to poop anywhere besides her pants. She tries. She sits on the potty. She grunts. Sometimes she toots and triumphantly exclaims, "I pooped in the potty!" There are never any solids in the potty, though.

I asked her pediatrician for hints on teaching her to use the potty. Most of his advice involved a bacchanalia for bowel movements on the potty. That's a great step two, but we still need help getting her to poop properly in the first place.

I've heard that we need to anticipate when she'll poop, figure out when in the day it happens, and make her sit on the potty until she does it. I mentally tracked her poop times for a few weeks without finding a pattern. Over the past few days, though, I've found a fairly specific time of day that she poops. That would be great news, except the time she poops is naptime.

About half the time I walk into her room after naptime, I discover that she pooped. In the best case scenario, that's frustrating because it's a missed teaching opportunity to find a load in her pants. In the real world, that's frustrating because the load is always in the carpet. And maybe the bed. And sometimes the walls.

Abbie hates having poopy pants. I can't blame her for that, but I can blame her for immediately removing those poopy pants instead of getting me to help her. Abbie may hate wearing poopy clothes, but she doesn't mind being surrounded by poopy objects. The result is I find a nice clean Abbie after naptime standing on a nasty carpet.

So I'm adjusting her naptime routine. Today I sat her on the potty before naptime, and emphasized the importance of pooping. Before I left her in bed, I reminded her to come get me if she needed to poop. When she howled in protest a few minutes later, I rushed to her room, found it still clean, and sat her on the potty again. I returned her to bed, and continued talking about proper pooping procedure. When I heard silence from her room for several minutes, I assumed the best.

15 minutes later she howled again. I rushed into her room to find poop everywhere. Then I howled.

* That's a near complete list of the activities she enjoys anymore.