Oh, Crap!

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Yes, I am going to talk about poop! Let me educate you first. Kids with Down syndrome tend to have low muscle tone (weaker muscles). This can effect every part of their body that has muscles from their head to their toes (and everything in between). As a result of this low tone, potty training can be quite challenging. If you don't poop for a few days or a week, well you know what happens (time to eat a bag of prunes!).

Caleb is 6, and he is still not potty trained. We are working on it, but like every other aspect of his life this is just taking a bit longer to learn. Caleb does stand at the toilet to pee, and back in June we had him pooping on the toilet quite regularly. Then we took a trip to Kentucky and Caleb seemed to have left his "pooping skills" in that beautiful Bluegrass State!

The rest of the summer has been spent trying to "catch" Caleb right before he needed to have a BM, run him to the toilet, and then pray he would excrete on the pot. No luck, until this past week! After lots of singing, a few tears and even a bag of fruit snack, he did it! He pooped in the potty for the first time in 2 1/2 months. This turd was HUGE! It would have made a grown man cry, poor kid... No wonder he hates to poop!

Caleb has this great skill of waiting to use the bathroom until we are out. Most of the time I have to take him to a public toilet (nasty, I hate public restrooms!). A few days after Caleb's "successful" bowl movement we stopped by a friends house. Of course, he had to go to the bathroom as soon as we got there. What we did not know is that he had to poop! Frank spent several minuets with him in the restroom encouraging him to do his business. He did! He pooped on the potty again! We were so proud of him that we did the "potty dance" and made up a silly song about pooping. Then the flood waters came. Caleb's ginormous BM not only stopped up the toilet, it caused the toilet to overflow! The entire bathroom was flooded and the contaminated waters began rushing into the hall way. "Holy crap!"

After shop-vaccing and scrubbing their floors Frank's only comment was, "I would gladly clean an over flowing toilet if it means Caleb pooping on the potty!" Thank goodness these are really good friends! They laughed. We laughed. And Frank left them with a very clean bathroom!