Two Steps Back

Earlier this week, given that toilet training seems to be going so well, we decided to transition the Monster into regular underwear for his trips to and from school.

Now, obviously, this wouldn’t normally be newsworthy at his age, but everyone who’s been following this blog knows how much we’ve been working to get the Monster to this point.  Toileting is even one of his IEP goals.

The problem is where the toilet training intersects with discipline and other things.

In the last three days, we’ve had three accidents at home.  Every last one of them has been at least tangentially related to discipline (or someone’s attempt to impose it) and his being distracted with other things.  Usually, the pattern has been going as such – everything’s fine, he acts out, he gets chastised and/or sent to time out, and once everything’s calm and whatnot, he doesn’t alert us to a need to go to the bathroom and soaks himself.

Now, we haven’t (yet) given up on this effort.  He’s still wearing his underwear except for when he’s in bed.  (We did change back to training underwear yesterday, but that was more because we ran out of clean underwear that wasn’t in the dryer, and to be at least a little nice to my mother-in-law, who was watching them last night so we could hit the theater.)  It definitely feels like a major step backwards when he’s been doing so well announcing that he needs to go to the bathroom.

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