Avery's....issues.

This is going to be a big, long post about the #1 source of my stress for the past 6 months. And no, it's not Tyler's ridiculously long hours and lack of family time or quality together alone time, it's about Avery. And her poop. I'm writing about it for two reasons. 1) It is a HUGE source of stress for me and I feel like people are missing a big part of why I'm a big whiner about life being hard right now if they don't understand this and 2) because maybe it will help someone. When I had all my struggles with mastitis I posted about it and I had quite a few people contact me with questions and I felt like I was able to help some people out.

Either way, I'm writing about it and here's what's going down. If you don't want to hear about potty training and kid poop then you should just go ahead and skip this post.

About 6 months ago I noticed that Avery was starting to resist going poop in her diaper. She would run off in a corner when she felt the urge to push and clench her little butt cheeks together so the poop couldn't come out. I didn't know what to make of it and just tried to tell her "Don't hold in your poop, it needs to come out" or whatever. Of course that didn't help and she continued to do it and we ended up holding her down on the floor sometimes so she wouldn't be able to clench her legs closed and she could poop. After about a month of this I decided maybe I should try potty training her. I thought maybe she disliked having the poop in her diaper and if I showed her how to poop in the toilet she wouldn't try to stop going.

So we potty trained. I think she was probably 2 years 4 months or so. I thought that was a little early to begin, but decided to try to see if it would help her poop. She picked up the peeing in the toilet pretty quick. It took her a little longer to figure out that she couldn't pee if she was wearing underwear so we had a few weeks of her running around the house naked, but I think maybe like 3 or so weeks and she was pretty set on going pee in the potty all the time. She even did pretty good with the pooping for a while. But not long after that she started holding in her poop again.

This is when things started to get really frustrating for me. Now that she was wearing underwear holding in her poop was making huge messes for me because her body was trying to poop and so some would come out before she was able to get control and hold the rest in so now I was dealing with streaks of poo in her underwear that we would have to change 10-12 times a day until she FINALLY could not hold it in any longer and then it would all come out and we would be okay for another 2-3 days until the whole process started all over again. 

Cleaning out poopy underwear is not easy. (I will never cloth diaper my babies, no way. Why anyone would subject themselves to that misery by choice is beyond me). I would have to take off Avery's poopy underwear which almost always involved getting it on her legs so then I would have to wash her legs and bottom in the bath. Then I need to rinse out the underwear in the tub, throw it in my mop bucket to soak out more poop, then bleach the tub (because feces). Then after I had enough of a collection of underwear to wash I would have to put the nasty poop water in the toilet so I'm not adding poop water to the washing machine water and then wash the undies. And I was doing this on average 10 times A DAY! Until the poop finally came and then reprieve for a couple days and at it again. Completely exhausting and completely frustrating and I was having frequent melt downs about it. Mom crying, Avery crying, Mom shouting, Avery crying and probably terrified of me. We were in a bad cycle.

So, why didn't I just put Avery back in diapers? Well, I did. If she pooped in her undies twice in a day she wore a diaper the rest of the day. Part of me was resisting the diapers again though because we had just gone through the whole potty training process which isn't exactly fun. I spent nearly two weeks just staying home so we could run to the potty asap when necessary and to make sure she got it down. Looking back I think I should have bagged the whole thing and just re-trained her later but having just done it, it felt like way too much work to go through again when I had just sacrificed two weeks of my life to do it.

Anyway, at this point I started looking at medication. I was already trying to make sure she had plenty of fiber in her diet and trying to feed her lots of fruits and veggies and stay hydrated. (She is really bad at drinking water so I think this is part of what makes her stools so hard). Anyone who has a 2-year-old knows that you don't exactly dictate what they eat though. Avery is currently averse to eating almost any kind of vegetable (she used to be SO good about it!) and pretty much just wants to survive off of chocolate milk Daddy brings home from the hospital. I actually can't think of one think Avery will eat every time I offer it to her. Some days she loves chicken nuggets and other days she won't touch them and that's about how it is with every meal. I think last night for dinner she had 3 pieces of bacon, 1 apple slice, and 1 tiny bite of pineapple. So random and unpredictable.

So I went to the store and got mirilax, mineral oil, fiber vitamin gummy chews, and some other things I think I took back later. I was afraid to give her too much mirilax because the bottle said under 17 consult a doctor and Tyler had no idea. I tried some different things, but nothing consistently and nothing was really helping. We (Tyler) even gave her an enema one day and while it did get the poop out it didn't solve the problem of her needing to be pooping consistently ever day, on her own. 

One day Tyler got so fed up with it he stopped at the store on his way home from work and bought some suppositories. When he got home he told Avery "If you don't go poop in 5 minutes I'm putting this medicine in your bottom" and he stuck her on the toilet. Of course she didn't poop so he gave her the suppository which she HATED. And that is an understatement. She was sooo upset and screamed and cried and screamed and cried some more when it started to work on her and her body forced her to poop. It was very traumatic for everyone. After that the suppositories kind of became the new normal for us. We would tell her if she didn't go poop Daddy was going to have to put more medicine in her bottom and she really didn't want that so that helped her go a little more consistently, but not really. 

I finally made an appointment with a doctor about it. I had never worked with her before and I didn't think she was all that helpful. She told me to use the mirilax and get her poop really runny for 3 days so she would realize it wasn't painful to poop and then ease off the mirilax. I did that for a week and that was the messiest, grossest week of all and I hated it. Poop everywhere and lots and lots of laundry. I quit giving it to her and soon after that it was back to the same thing.

At this point I was totally at a loss. We went home for Colorado for Christmas and Avery continued to refuse to go poop. I gave her some suppositories there (a different brand which didn't work for some reason) and we spent a lot of time on the toilet but no results. 

When we got back from Christmas I switched doctors and made an appointment with the new doctor to talk about it. When I went in for the appointment I brought ALL of the meds we had been using and was nearly in tears as I explained our situation to the doctor. She was so understanding and gave me a game plan to get us back on track. She was really awesome. I was ready to cry and hug her and invite her to dinner by the time we finished our visit because it felt SO good to have a plan and feel like I was in control of the situation. I think the biggest reason for my frustrating was just not knowing what to do about it. Now that I do, I feel like I can handle it.

So here's what she told me. Mirilax is going to be our best friend and this could take up to 6 MONTHS to get it figured out. I started giving Avery 2-3 capfulls of mirilax every day for 3 days and then taper it down from there. I put her back in diapers permanently (for now) while she is pooping uncontrollably. In addition to that we sit Avery on the toilet for 5-10 minutes after EVERY meal to give her a chance to go poop. She gets a reward just for sitting there even if she doesn't go. This has been a HUGE help to me. At first when I was giving her so much mirilax she would go every time I sat her on the toilet. As I've weaned it down she doesn't go every time anymore, but we are in the habit of trying.

We've been at it for about 3 weeks now and things have been getting better. Avery seems to not be bothered by pooping anymore, but now she just poops in the diaper and doesn't even try to make it to the toilet. For now, I'm not worrying about it because as long as she is pooping I don't care if it's in the diaper. She still takes her diaper off to pee so I'm hopefully that I'm not completely back tracking on potty training, but even if we are, it's okay.

The last few days I've been trying to skip doses of mirilax so she only gets some every other day (and just a small amount), but I've noticed that she is starting to hold her poop in again. I don't know what else to do except increase the dosage again so that's what I'm doing. I have no idea why she hates pooping so much!! Her stools have been so soft and watery for a long time now so she knows it doesn't hurt, but for some reason she just does not want to poop!

And that's where we are now. I'm still in the middle of figuring it out, but at least we have a plan and the doctor is very supportive and helpful. I took Kendall in for a check up last week and she asked about Avery and how it was going and seems to think we are making progress, it's just going to take a while.

So that's my life. If you cared to read this whole thing, bless you. Some day (probably when Avery is like 16 and dating and doing dumb teenage things) I'm sure I will look back on the trial and wish for this trial rather than a more life-changing one, but right now this feels like a huge burden on me and I am struggling! But there is light at the end of the tunnel and at least we have a plan.

The End