Children are creatures of habit – children on the Spectrum more so.

It’s taken us a while to get the Monster into the swing of things in terms of a daily rhythm. Whether that day is a school day or not is immaterial.  Case in point – on Friday, he was home from school for the day, but he still got up reasonably “early” and still wanted to get dressed.  But while that’s not bad on a weekday, when I have to be up anyway, it’s not so great on weekends.

But every day is reasonably the same. He gets up somewhere around 7 – either woken by one of us or on his own – goes to the bathroom and gets out of his pajamas and pull-up in there.  One of us gets him, and then he gets dressed, has breakfast, and starts his day.

We’ve been working with R on morning procedures as well, specifically around weekends.  My wife and I rarely get to sleep in, and R is at the point that we’re trying to encourage him to get out of bed and use the bathroom if he needs to… but he’s not quiet, and he’s not quite gotten down the “if Mommy and Abba’s door is closed, let them sleep” bit.  We’ve been talking to him about it – the Monster, on the other hand, is usually very quiet until someone comes to get him.

So Saturday morning, I could hear someone get up around 7:15… and I wasn’t worried, because I thought I heard that same bedroom door close, the occasional sound of someone moving around.  No big deal, and I prepared to go back to sleep for another 45 minutes.  But then, around 7:25, I hear R in a loud voice.

“[Monster], are you naked?  Did you poop?  Are you naked, [Monster]?”  (I should note that, like most 3-4 year olds, R is currently fascinated by poop.  Apparently, he and his bestie at preschool are going through all the permutations of calling people things with ‘pee’, ‘poo’ and ‘diaper’ attached to them.)  After about four or five minutes of this… I decided I should be concerned.  This was coupled with hearing the distinctive sound of a child hitting the crash pad in Monster’s room… which meant that he was up and moving, and potentially making a mess.

Yes, R was right.  *sigh*

I think the new discussion with R about morning procedures is going to be, for the time being, that if the Monster’s up and about, that he has permission to come knock on our bedroom door and get someone up…  On the other hand, I suppose I should be grateful that at least I had some warning.