In Which I Talk About Poop

Readers beware: this is another one of those horrifying posts about everyone's favorite topic . . . poop. I hadn't visited the topic lately, what with the whole husband-getting-half-blown-up thing, and the Connor-allergic-to-the-lavender-of-doom thing, and the buying-a-house thing, and at any rate Connor evidently thought it had been far too long since I talked about his bodily functions, so he gave me some new blogging material. It would probably be best for you all to just blow off this post and go look at pictures of fluffy baby bunnies or something.

So don't blame me, gentle reader, if you continue on: you've been warned.

Anyway Connor, like a lot of children who have g-tubes, has the occasional round of GI troubles. You will recall the terrifying Poop Explosion incident of last January as a prime example of one end of the scale, and the even more shocking Poop Hairdo tragedy of April as an example of the extreme other end. Connor tends to swing back and forth from one end of pendulum to the other, and I am constantly tweaking his diet (leaving out fiber or adding our good friend Miralax) to try and keep him in balance. With all the chaos around here the last few weeks I'd been neglecting to monitor the state of things, if you will, and so it was only after we got back from the wedding in Texas and I was the only person changing diapers again that I realized I should probably start feeding the kid a whole lot of prunes, as things were rather stopped up in there. Um, right.

Anyway, the difficulty with managing this sort of thing is it's a delicate science. I know what the max dose of Miralax is for the kid, but most of the time that's far, far too much for him. So I have to figure out by trial and error what exactly is going to work. This time Connor was pretty uncomfortable, and upping his liquid intake and fiber didn't seem to have much of an effect, so I started him on the Miralax yesterday and, figuring he'd need a bit more to really get things moving, gave him a moderate dose.

I was wrong. Oh, was I wrong.

As I walked down the hallway towards Connor's room to get him after he finished his nap, a rather distinctive smell came wafting up from underneath the door. "Uh oh," I thought. I pushed open the door and beheld a scene so catastrophically horrific I can hardly describe it.

It was Poop Armageddon.

There was poop on the floor. There was poop on the crib. There was poop on every blanket and sheet inside the crib, and right smack dab in the middle of all this smelly destruction was my child, giggling away and waving his poop-covered hands wildly in the air, splatter-painting the wall above the crib in the process. He seemed to be very proud of himself.

I was not quite as thrilled.

So after gingerly stripping Connor down and getting him and the Poopageddon, if you will, cleaned up, I've learned a number of valuable lessons. The first is, for goodness sake, start with the minimum dose on the Miralax and work up from there. The second is that I have a child who is capable, when left to his own ends, of generating an entire load of laundry within five minutes all by himself. The third lesson is that it is best not to look directly up while you are attempting to remove poop from the ceiling.

Eww.

~Jess