Potty Training Juliet and an education in Stool Withholding

 Forest was not an easy baby/toddler/preschooler but he took it easy on us in several major ways: sleep training, learning to read, potty training, etc. I've come to learn that he was a potty training unicorn- pretty much picked it up right away and never looked back. 

But that's not the whole story. The whole story is that he picked it right away *the second time* we tried to train him. The first time, he was 22 months old and after 4 days we threw in the towel. It was a total mess, and even though he was having plenty of successes, he was also having plenty of accidents and we just were not ready for a long uphill process. 

Fast forward to training him at 2.5 and I was like 'pee and poo go in the potty' and he was like 'cool- got it.' So when Juliet came around I planned to potty train her as she approached 2.5 as well. Then at 21 months she started *asking* to potty, and actually going. 

At that point in time we still hadn't gotten our shipment, were in the middle of a bunch of house projects and visitors and getting our stuff from Thailand and it was just not the time to be going all in on the potty training thing. So we did the total opposite of what our preferred method 'oh Crap Potty Training' (OCPT) suggested and just did a casual thing where we put a potty seat in her room and let her go when she wanted but put her in diapers otherwise. 

She started asking to go more and more frequently and was keeping her diaper mostly dry. About a month after turning 2 her preschool teacher told me she thought we should potty train her or at least put her in pull ups, since she was asking to go and going at school. 

Juliet asking to use the potty at library before we started training. Public potties have never been an issue.

We decided to give it a go over Labor Day weekend (Juliet was 2 years and 1 month old at the start). We only had 3 full days at home before she'd be going to the church nursery and preschool which was very different than when we trained with Forest and I had a full week cleared to tackle it. 

Our plan was to start naked, move to commando and then try for little outings to build up to being left in the nursery for 2.5 hours the following Tuesday. The short story is she initially did great! We were able to start doing short outings by that Sunday morning. Since she was already peeing on the potty frequently we knew it would just be a matter of doing that 100% of the time. The first two weeks she was seriously peeing every 20-40 minutes. So not having accidents but holy moly, I couldn't do a 30 minute school drop off run without having to pull over to let her pee. So that was the first hiccup. 

In the early potty training days, she'd sometimes go and pee in the empty potty seat while I was still cleaning out the bowl from the last time. 

The second hiccup was poop. Another major reason we decided to go ahead and potty train is that Juliet was displaying some withholding behavior that was leading to some constipation issues. She was almost exclusively pooping at school and having massive blowout type situations there. At home, she seemed distressed to poop in her diaper so was often sneaking off, taking her diaper off, and pooping on the bathroom floor next to the toilet. We hoped it wouldn't be too big of an adjustment to get her to move that BM to on top of the toilet rather than next to it and also hoped that going in the potty might ease her withholding habit and make her more regular. But we were wrong. 

We didn't get a single poop in our 3 days at home.  So we decided to break code with OCPT again and put her in a pull up for church/school until we had some poop success. We asked the staff to treat her like she's potty trained and take her regularly and listen when she says she needs to go. She's done great with that but does still poop in her pull up every single school day at preschool, 5 months later. They've told me she tries to poop on the potty several times but very little, if anything, comes out and then she ends up pooping in her pull up while on the playground. Once she's pooped they put her in undies for the rest of the day and she hasn't really had any accidents in that department.

She was clearly trying, but this is all that would come out. 

 

About 3 weeks into potty training she just walked over to the potty and pooped, NBD. We thought that was a turning point but then it took her another 5 days to poop at home again and then the next time was another 2 weeks after that. She was just withholding as much as she could until she got to school and during the weekends she was totally miserable. 

We tried to be really proactive with the withholding, mainly because we wanted to just get the potty training thing under our belts. We hired an 'Oh Crap' Potty Training Consultant worked with her on following the Oh Crap method for tackling more extreme poop issues- which is essentially forcing them to get over their withholding by giving suppositories everyday for a week. Looking back, it sounds absolutely crazy that we followed this advice, but we did. And it took our withholding problem from bad to horrendous in 3 days flat (at which point we stopped the suppositories and fired the consultant who told us that putting her in a pull up to poop was the worst thing we could do. Worse that giving her a suppository and forcing her to sit on a potty while she screams??? I don't think so). 

Forest's turn to play 'poop doula'

We went from trying to get poops in the potty to just trying to get her to poop period. Anytime she felt the urge she would absolutely panic, cling to my legs, cry, etc, but it would take 2 days of that hysteria until she was finally able to release it.  We have stopped the suppositories at the advice of our doctor and are just giving her a pretty high dose of miralax at this point. There is lots of fear mongering about miralax out there, but we've done our research and trust our doctor. It's the most gentle stool softener on the market and for the first time in months of trial and error we are actually seeing progress. She's pooped 3 times at home in the past 10 days, which hasn't happened since potty training. She's actually pooped 4 days in a row so we are really on a streak! 

It's not ideal, but at this point, we just need to her to poop so I'm trying not to stress about where she poops.  She clearly has the control to hold it, recognizes the sensation that she needs to go and is able to release it when she's comfortable (in the sandbox at school, apparently), so now we are just trying to slowly shift that release to a more socially acceptable place like the potty!

Most of her poops at home are in the potty and the last 2 have been her just randomly taking herself to the potty and announcing afterward that she pooped. So much different than the past few months where she'd verbalize the need to poop for days and then become increasingly frantic as the ability to hold it in became harder. 

So after 5 months, I would still call Juliet 'potty training' vs 'potty trained', which is frustrating but I've learned to let that go. She really has done great with pee and that is something we never even worry about. She takes herself and basically never has accidents. 

You can't make your kid eat, poop, or sleep and Juliet likes to remind us of these facts on the daily. I sometimes think she was sent to this world for the sole purpose of humbling me and she is surely doing a thorough job of it!