Sh*tty Day

The past two days have been pretty sh*tty both literally and figuratively. My children have adopted positions at opposite ends of the BM spectrum, which ends up leaving me pretty much up to my elbows in the not-oft-discussed excretions. The boy child grows through these periods where he doesn't eliminate for several days and then ends up having these 'soiling' events. There are times when you can tell he needs to go but he refuses. His age and the frequency with which we deal with this lead me to do a few google searches and found several sites which are very informative on the subject of encopresis. Essentially, after ignoring the urge to go frequently enough for whatever reason (i.e. pain during constipation) the brain just starts to ignore the signal. Stuff starts to back up. It gets pretty ugly, if interested in learning more (questionably likely), visit link above. But, essentially, the experts insist that the child effected by this is not doing it on purpose. So, I have been working to be extra understanding and compassionate during this time. Unfortunately, as it turns out, I am human. You see, between the scrubbing of dirty underpants and reading in the bathroom for periods of over 30 minutes, my other charge finds her way into trouble. At one point today, I felt completely overwhelmed. I just couldn't keep up. By lunch time, I had already changed at least 4 poopy diapers, and dealt with this other issue, including a trip to the pharmacy for some over-the-counter remedies as recommended by our pediatric practice. Another frustrating thing about all this is that after I've done all this research about encopresis and try to talk to the medical staff informedly about it, I just get the impression that they're like, "Yes, yes, thank you, but you'd better let the professionals take care of this." They just talked about fixing the 'flow' right now and didn't address the chronic nature of the problem.

I don't mean for this to sound like poor me at all. After all, I get to be home with two (mostly) wonderful kids, and our problems could be far worse. I think what makes this all the more difficult right now is that I am listening to the audio book "Children are from Heaven" by John Gray (author of the Mars and Venus books). The CAFH book/content is about positive parenting skills and love-based parenting. As I am trying to learn and implement some of his techniques, I end up stumbling over some of my old habits and end up getting more and more frustrated with myself and my parenting, my organization, and my planning. I am going to persevere with it though, as his ideas and logic make sense on most levels.