And again, everything comes back to poo.
Obviously, one of our ongoing frustrations – and not an uncommon one for parents in our situation – is getting the Monster toilet trained. While his IEP includes this as a goal, so we’re not going it alone, this is something he needs to master at some point if we have any hope of his getting mainstreamed down the road.
We do have a daily routine, having discovered that the timing method doesn’t work. He goes when he gets up, again before the bus if he wasn’t successful on that first attempt, and then again when he gets home from school, plus whenever we think he’s ‘signaling’ a need to go.
Because the wife had jury duty yesterday, I was on daddy duty at home with the baby, which also means I was the one to meet the Monster when he got off the bus. I ushered him into the house, and had little fight getting him onto the toilet at that point (it’s 45 minutes between when he leaves school and arrives home, so we figure he’s usually ready). Without much trouble at all, he was happily sitting there and doing his thing, when he did his thing.
“Good job, Monster!” I told him while I was sitting close by on. “You’re peeing in the toilet!”
“Pooping in the toilet!” he countered.
No, no he was not. So I tried to correct him. “No… peeing in the toilet. [Monster] is…”
“Pooping in the toilet,” he insisted. And then he did.
I like the fact that this means he’s gaining an awareness of his needs and when he ought to be headed for the bathroom. Even later in the evening – when we did, in fact, have an epic fail – he had, as I pointed out to the wife, informed us that there was a need to go to the bathroom, one that we’d not quite understood (and that I suspect meant more that he’d gone and was aware that he missed). But it is definitely progress.
Hooray!!!!!