My son is 2-1/2 and is the sweetest, smartest, sparkly-eyed boy you could ever hope to meet. He can do 48 piece puzzles by himself. He walks around the house singing. He throws away his fruit snack wrapper without being asked. And he plays with his poop.
More than six months ago he started showing interest in the potty and I got excited. I hoped he would potty train quickly since he so loves to be like his big sister and since he’s such a smarty. For months he peed on the potty, we clapped, he joyfully collected M&Ms, all was well. He wouldn’t poop on the potty but it didn’t worry me because his sister took awhile to be comfortable with that too. I just changed his messy diapers and figured their days were numbered.
But pretty soon he realized having a messy diaper was no fun and that since he was a big boy, he should take off his messy diaper and get rid of it since it wasn’t much fun to sit in. This usually happened at “rest time” (our household’s sleepless but fairly successful version of nap time) and it wasn’t long before that discarded dirty diaper became just too tempting.
The first pooptastrophe happened a few weeks before Christmas and I will never forget the sights and smells I beheld when I opened his bedroom door. We’ve all seen those viral photo threads of kids doing unbelievable things, like painting TV screens, or decorating the baby’s face with permanent marker. The real life version is that same heart-dropping horror, amplified about fifty times.
(This is one of the only pooptastrophe photos I took, a fumbling phone photo snapped in disbelief. My apologies if you were eating lunch while reading.)
The weeks and months since that day have been rife with pooptastrophes. Not every day, but about every week. I have cleaned poop off of trucks, curtains, grout, bedposts, fingernails, puzzles (threw most of those away), noses, sheets and blankets, windows, doorknobs, books, and more. I have become like a hound dog, my nose to the wind, sniffing down an undiscovered turd in the corner, a smear of feces on a lego.
I set out on a mission to stop this disaster. I’m a problem/solution kind of girl. Problem? Son playing with poop. Solution? Get him to stop. But, as with a lot of parenting obstacles, it’s not that simple. Because we are messy, complicated people. And because two year olds aren’t great at specifically communicating their feelings and needs.
I could give a play-by-play of all the things I tried these past months, trying to end the pooptastrophes. I’ll spare you my tales of failure. But know that I did fail. So many times. Lincoln failed too….failed to obey, failed to understand what I asked him to do or stop doing. It frustrated us both. I could tell after awhile that he hated what he was doing, but he just couldn’t stop. Isn’t that true of us so often? We hate our sin, the messes we make, but we persist in them. Proverbs 26:11 has certainly come to life for me: “Like a dog that returns to his vomit is a fool who repeats his folly” (ESV). It is disgusting and reprehensible, but we still do it. Until someone helps us find a way out.
Cold showers were what finally clicked for my son. After many miserable months, many plans tried and failed, I read an online thread with advice given to a woman by her pediatrician. When her twin toddlers made messes with their poop, she was advised to give them a cold shower. It served a dual purpose: get them clean, and make it an uncomfortable experience that would be unmistakably linked to the choice they’d made.
So a few days later, when the bedroom windows were fingerpainted with poop, I gently carried my messy son to the shower and turned it on. Cold. It was heartbreaking to see his excitement as I undressed him (he thought he was getting a bubble bath) turn to disbelief and terror when I put him under the spray. I had to hold him in there while I soaped him and rinsed him, because he kept trying to claw his way out. When I finally turned off the water and wrapped him in a towel, I held him and we both cried.
And two days later, we did it again. Twice in the same day. Two poop messes, two cold showers. I thought I was failing at yet another attempt to help him, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. This was my hail mary. But something shifted after that third shower. Instead of taking off his diaper, he went back to telling us when he was stinky and waiting patiently to be cleaned. If it was rest time, he obediently knocked on his door until I answered and changed him. He is still nowhere near potty trained, but none of us could care less. And now it has been more than a month since the last pooptastrophe.
And you know what I see in his face now? Relief. Freedom, even. He despised the messes he was making as much as I did, and although the discipline required to make it all stop was unpleasant, it was necessary and it reaped results. That’s one of the huge reasons we discipline our children: it is an uncomfortable process that ultimately rescues them from the greater discomfort (and even danger) of wallowing in their poopy sin. We love them too much to leave them stranded in their mess. It’s a small and imperfect picture of Christ’s perfect ultimate rescue of all of us, going infinitely beyond poopy messes and loving cold showers. He paid it all for us:
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship,created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Eph 2:4-10).
Stay At Home Mayhem 