Fecal Phobia

Please consider yourself warned, this post is all about bodily functions....
I've always for some reason or another been embarassed over the fact that I do have bowel movements. Even as I typed that I felt embarassment. I know that everyone does, but don't talk about it. As I type I also realize how absurd my embarassment is. I'm also afraid of poop. Afraid of what will happen if Steven discovers it in his diaper. Friday night I heard of a friend whose daughter painted her crib with poop. Recently my nephew took poop and smeared it in the carpet. Oh, and Steven is "curious" like at least all boys are at one point or the other, but Steven's more obsessed with his curiosity. I know that the next step will be in his curioisity that he finds his poop, which is my nightmare. Add in to the fact that most mornings Chad is now gone before Steven is up, so it will be MY job to handle the situation.

Therefore, we are trying to preempt Steven and start the process of potty training. I have a friend who naked potty trains. I was always disgusted by this idea, but we typically can predict when Steven is going to poop, so we really just need to work on the peeing. In the past few weeks I've noticed Steven has been aware of himself peeing sometimes and pooping most of the time. He's also started saying poop when we go to change his diaper. Saturday was our test run to see if he could stop midstream in his pee. He got stripped down to just a shirt (did I mention I'm pretty modest and Chad's even more so). He loved it. He just kept grinning. And so the watching began. After awhile he starting to pee. I wasn't in the room, so Chad called his name out and he stopped. We rushed him to the toilet and he never continued. He sat on the toilet backwards and played with the toilet lid for a while and then got frustrated so I took him off. All in all he was diaperless for about 1 hr 45 min and only had the one episode of starting to pee. He must take after me because I never pee. But it was time to stop our tiral run because we needed to eat lunch and I wasn't going to clean up pee from the high chair.

I've been told we need to keep it fun for him. So this was not a fun time for me, and I'm afraid that I'll be so stressed out that he will get stressed out. The "plan" is to give him exposure to seeing/feeling the need to pee in the potty with an hour or two of naked time every day as the days allow. My full day in the office won't be a day unless Chad is off that day, then maybe he'll take over. It's going to be interesting and I'm not sure what the next step will be, but this is all in the guise of avoiding my fear of cleaning up poop on the carpet and crib.

We'll see how it goes.