On the poop deck

(Warning: discussion of gastrointestinal function ahead.)

"I don't need 'positories any more!" Maia said brightly yesterday. Then she took a wipe and tried to stuff it up her ducky's butt.

We went to Seattle last week. While we had a good time overall, travel didn't agree with Maia's digestive system. There were no poops for the first two days, and when she was straining but getting nothing out, we decided to use suppositories, which we've used for her once before. They were highly effective then, but she was ambivalent about them--she knew they worked, but she didn't like how they went in, which I really can't blame her for--and refused these. Of course, being two, her refusal didn't mean as much as she might have wished. We administered several of them, as well as tons of fruit and juice and gummy fiber pills (Chloë also had a couple since they tasted yummy, she said, but since she didn't need any of that sort of help and we're the ones who wipe her butt, she went off them), and eventually a vegetable laxative pill.

She didn't do terribly well the remainder of the trip, but it wasn't so bad we wanted to take her to a doctor. She did start crossing her legs when she was straining, presumably because it hurt--she mentioned this a couple of times when I was changing her, so I took extra care cleaning her, and when I forgot once told me, "Wipe gentwy!" We discouraged the leg-crossing, and by a couple days after we got back, she had gotten back to normal consistency and frequency. She got milk today for the first time in a week.

We're not sure how much each remedy helped, but I'm fairly confident that getting back to her normal schedule was a part of it. Funny how travel can affect something like digestion and excretion. She didn't have this problem our last trip out, admittedly. But it certainly wasn't the change in diet, since Mom and Dad pushed fruit and vegetables even more than we do.

Unassailable logic

"I want that," Maia said, pointing up to Chloë's solar system mobile this morning.

"Which one?" Chloë asked her. "Jupiter?"

"Yeah."

"She wants Jupiter," Chloë told me. "But not the real Jupiter."

"Why not?" I inquired.

"Because one, she couldn't carry it. And two, it wouldn't be in orbit any more. And three, it would be bigger than a room."

Rip-off

"Where's your ow?" Chloë inquired of Maia in the bath the other day.

"On my chest," Maia decided, and together they applied a wet washcloth onto her chest.

"Now, it's time to take off your Band-Aid, Maia," Chloë said kindly. "It's not going to hurt. Ready? One--" She yanked off the washcloth. "That didn't hurt, did it?"

The removal of Band-Aids is Chloë's hangup, not Maia's, of course. I thought it was interesting she chose to channel her experiences in that way. (The "I'll count to three...one [rip]" technique is Eric's; I just reach over and pull it off quickly when she's not prepared.)