Mother's Little Helper

It was time for us to give Ellie her Mylanta to help her continuing constipation situation. Before anyone gets too excited about this, Ellie has a love-hate relationship with her bowels. She is constantly holding in her "business" until she is so backed-up, she nearly bursts at the seams. We have to coax her into a BM on a daily basis, so potty-training is pretty much on hold until we can get past this desire to keep it to herself. So where was I? Yes, the Mylanta Exchange.

We have tried a multitude of strategies for this, all of which seem to have only worked once. Usually a bribe for a cookie, or candy, or ice cream does the trick, however, this night they were as successful as pulling out a week-old dinner from the refrigerator; nothing was going to get her to take that darned cherry-flavored, milky shot of Mylanta.

We tried the tender talk approach. The one where we try to thoroughly explain that it helps her tummy, yada, yada, yada. The soft words were drained out by her yelping screams of disgust.

We finally had to pull out the big guns and use the "daddy" voice to get the job done. Of course, she was so worked up by this time that she gulped a huge swig and immediately started to regurgitate the blessed corndog meal (see previous post, "Godzilla"). Lucky for all of us, Abbie was there lickety-split with a motherly cupped hand to catch the fine collage of pink Mylanta and re-reprocessed meat chunks the size of marbles.

Now if that's not love, I don't know what is. Abbie can even tell you this story with a smile on her face. Oh, the powers of gestation. Amazing.