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Monthly Archives: October 2012
Constipation and Encopresis: Expert Dr. Pia Fenimore
My 5-year-old son doesn’t have bowel movements regularly. I assumed he is constipated so I have been giving him fiber gummies daily. But my biggest concern is that I find small amounts of stool in his underwear almost daily and he says he cannot feel it when it comes out. I looked this up online and am thinking maybe its Encopresis. I am wondering if I should take him to the doctor or just use maybe an enima to clean him out and continue with the fiber.
Yes it does sound like encopresis. This is a problem that results from chronic constipation which leads to a stretching of the lower colon causing a decrease in sensation and therefore stool leakage or smearing.
This is definitely something you want to see your healthcare provider about as soon as possible. Your son will likely need an x-ray to confirm the problem, as well as enemas and laxatives for cleaning him out. Then he will need a stronger daily regimen for keeping him regular.
This is a very complex problem and will need to be managed carefully by you and your pediatrician. Make sure when you make the appointment that your doctor’s staff understands that you need extra time with the provider to adequately address this problem.
Over My Shoulder
I come from a long male lineage of ‘Do It Yourselfer’s’. The men in my family were (and are) apt to spend an entire day, risk major blood loss, and use words that would make a mechanic blush trying to do something rather than make a phone call and pay the skilled professional for 30 minutes of his time. Learning these time honored traditions of rotary sawing, pipe tightening, and rewiring has become a rite of passage for us. Instead of being handed a spear and being told to go kill a lion, you got handed a socket wrench and were told to take the head off of the flat head V6 in the garage that hadn’t run since Carter was in office.
As a kid, I stood in silent awe of my father’s aptitude for being able to fix things. The man didn’t know how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without my mom’s help but if the washing machine needed a new belt for the motor, he could have it torn apart in a matter of minutes. If our car needed a new carburetor, if the downspout was down, if there were a leak needing to be contained, my Dad was your man.
I found out he learned much of his domestic mechanical engineering prowess from my grandfather. My grandfather was a mechanic by trade but moonlighted on Saturday and Sunday afternoons as a general contractor for his family. My Dad would stand behind my grandfather, staring over his shoulder, watching and learning how the red wire meant the wire you didn’t want to touch (why they didn’t turn the electric off first I have no idea). It was apparent that all of these lessons my Dad learned from my grandfather were best taught by my Dad looking over my grandfather’s shoulder.
October Mom of the Month – Emma Potter
“The good Lord never gives us too much to bear … but this is enough!”
Mom of the Month Emma Potter with grandsons.
These are the words of Mom of the Month, Emma Potter. And though she chuckles when she says them, she says them with sincerity.
Seventy-five-year-old Potter is raising her three grandsons: Michael, 16, Robert, 12, and Ryan, 11. In 2009 her son, Robert Potter, the boys’ father, tragically died following a domestic dispute with their mother. Their mother was charged with homicide and is now in jail.
Emma Potter, without any hesitation, took all three boys into her home. Potter remembers, “I really didn’t know what was going to happen with the boys, and I just wanted to make sure they were OK … especially Michael, who witnessed it. I was 70 years old, and I just took them in. I didn’t want them to be separated.”
At the time of her son’s death, Potter was at a point in her life where she was winding down. She had already raised her own four children: George, Robert, Kathryn and Susan.
Robert was not the first child Potter lost. In 2002, daughter Susan passed away from cancer. Potter was widowed in 1995, and she was on her own. When her own children were young, Potter was a stay-at-home mother. As they got a little older, Potter worked at Sears and stayed there for 23 years. When she retired from Sears, she worked part time at Weis Market in Bridgeport. She jokes that she has now returned to Weis, but only to keep buying food for the three growing boys.
Rules of Engagement
A friend of mine and fellow blogger, Abby Green at Abby Off The Record wrote a post about the rules she never thought she would ever have to make as a mom to enforce with her two boys, “Rules I Can’t Believe I Had to Make”. I urge you to go read her stuff. It’s good. Really good.
What Abby got me thinking about were the rules I’ve had to make for my two girls. Are there different rules for girls? What rules have I had to make? Not surprisingly, I thought of a few. Big thanks to Abby for letting me “borrow” her idea for my own post.
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Before my mom left my house and my wife and I alone with our newborn baby for the first time, she left me with this, “Remember, as long as she is fed, clean, and loved, she (and you) will be fine”
A simple rule for new parents scared out of our minds that we might break our daughter like she was a DVD player. I took and used my mom’s rule and for the first few months of my daughter’s life, it worked like a charm. Then something happened. My daughter began walking, talking, and finding things other than her feet or looking at herself in the mirror interesting. In the blink of an eye, the rule my mom so succinctly imparted on her way out of the house only a few months ago, didn’t mean squat. Feeding them, keeping them clean, and loving them still were important but so was keeping her from eating CD cases and walking down the cellar steps by herself. I needed a new set of rules.
The prerequisite ‘keep them safe’ rules came in to play of course. Don’t eat *fill in the blank*, Don’t touch *fill in the blank*, Don’t run with *fill in the blank*, Stay out of the *fill in the blank* were all instituted by the time daughter number 2 came. But before her and now well after, there have been a cavalcade of rules I found myself implementing. Some of them universal to all kids and some of them quite gender specific. Some of them I have made out of necessity and others were created by virtue of having two small girls running around my house.
Great Train Robbery Event Returns to Strasburg Rail Road
Strasburg, PA – Be on guard, as the Great Train Robbery is rumored to take place at the Strasburg Rail Road October 21, 2012. Passengers aboard the 4:00 p.m. train should be on the look out for a gang of robbers targeting the Strasburg area. To protect the passengers, law enforcement will be on hand to keep the peace and see that justice is served. Passengers should be warned that this trip is filled with theft, scandal and plenty of laughs.
Guests aboard this Strasburg Rail Road train will recognize the robbers by their early 20th century dress. The robbers, who are really improvisation actors from Act 1 Productions, will be mingling with guests at Strasburg’s train station, shops and on board the train. The unsuspecting passengers will be given “loot” to carry on the train, only to have it taken from them during the ride.
As the robbers move from car to car, they will interact with the passengers and try to swipe some loot. As the passengers give up their loot, they can also hand over real cash – all for a good cause. All money collected on the train will be donated to Big Brothers Big Sisters of Lancaster County. As the nation’s largest donor and volunteer supported mentoring network, Big Brothers Big Sisters makes meaningful, monitored matches between adult volunteers (“Bigs”) and children (“Littles”), ages 6 through 18, in communities across the country.
