Do green (continental) lentils do this to your LO?

[Laura032004]

I made DS1 a stew last week. It had meat, veg & red & green lentils in it. The only addition to the normal recipe was the green lentils. He would normally only poo once a day (during the night, early hours), but after the stew, he did a poo at about 10pm.

Last night, I made something else which I put green lentils in. Same thing happened, but he also said his tummy hurt after the meal before he went to bed. The poo was more like diahorrea than what he would normally do.

Is this common? Suppose I should just steer clear of them. Bugger. Now have 20 portions of unusable toddler meals. Anybody got a constipated child?...

Bump

Green lentils have their skins on, so they're pretty high fibre. And I think they can be a bit hard to digest, like other legumes.

How old is your DS1? You don't necessarily have to avoid them entirely, but maybe stick to them for lunch rather than tea?

He's 2.9yrs. Wouldn't like to give them for lunch, as then we'd have a poo to deal with mid-afternoon. He's just about potty trained, but we've had no success with pooing in the potty, so I'm sticking my head in the sand and avoiding the issue (He would poo in the daytime if I gave him a fruit smoothie for breakfast, so I don't! He's got a delicate tummy, so his poos are horrific and unless they're in a nappy, would be everywhere!).

Thanks for the reply BTW. Just couldn't understand why there was such a diff between the red and greeen lentils. Certainly they keep their shape etc when cooked, so they must be different in terms of skins on.

All the lentils other than the red ones have skins.

My kids always have horrible scary poos, because of their constantly high-fibre diet. Well, DS1's poos probably firmed up at 3 or 4.

Completely off topic now then, but how did this affect potty training for you?

Maybe that's the reason for DS's poo then - less delicate tummy, more fibre content of diet. His is probably quite high. His breakfast is brown rice flakes & millet flakes porridge(dairy / gluten intolerant), and he eats a lot of rice cakes - are they high fibre? I add lentils to most of his meals, and usually give him brown rice. Hmmm one to ponder.

That sounds reasonably high fibre. We're a brown-carb-only sort of household. I do try to keep DS2 (2y3m) away from the high-fibre homemade muesli, but not always with real success.

We had a bit of a struggle with poo for DS1. Firstly, I think he just didn't want to poo in the pot? We had a big prize for pooing in the pot - I took him on a special outing to a laundromat! He was obsessed with washing machines.

Ahem.

Anyway, yeah, loose stools are less unpleasant for the kid to pass, obviously, but accidents are more likely. I found he often needed to poo quite suddenly, and he did poo on a tree more than once (I always had carrier bags, and would bag it and bin it, obviously.)

I don't think the loose stools caused a real problem with toilet training. Yes, I sometimes had to clean up nightmarish poopy pants. More solid poo probably would have been easier then, but generally, it was fine.

Oh, it's your thread, go as off topic as you like. Not sure this is off topic anyway.

Oh, and I know at least one other high-fibre MNer whose son makes scary poos.

Not sure if he doesn't want to do a poo in the potty - my mum can get him to sit there for ages and wait for one, and he will often produce something. He does like privacy though, and isn't keen on telling us one is coming, or even that he's done one. Think as you say it's more of a case of it happening suddenly. He will sometimes go and hide if he's about to do a poo, but it's for seconds before the poo, rather than the minutes that friends kids seem to go off for.

Suppose I'm just being a bit lazy, but with having DS2 (6m) to cope with as well, the last thing that I want to deal with is poos out and about. He does wear a pull-up nappy if we go out somewhere where wet pants wouldn't be great (soft play etc), but they wouldn't contain his poo anyway. I also want to avoid these as much as poss anyway to get on top of the potty training. He doesn't care if he wees wearing a pull up.

I'm just so excited on the v.odd occasion that he does a solid poo (usually if we've been away, and he hasn't had his normal diet) that I almost get jealous of people whose kids have more solid poo! Sad or what! We went to stay with my parents recently, who'd bought him a smoothie maker (which he loved, even though he won't touch fruit or veg if it still looks like fruit or veg!), and he had so much fruit that he was pooing 8 times a day. It was horrific! I've hardly made them for him since.

BTW - sure DS1 would love a trip to a laundromat - he loves the car 'washing machine' aka car wash!