We’re half-way through July – meaning also half-way through both his summer camp and through the ESY services – and we’re trying desperately to do what we can to keep the Monster from regressing any further.

The biggest issue we’re facing is his regression on toileting.

That isn’t, of course, to diminish how he’s been sliding backwards on his verbal skills, or how we know that he’s not getting good practice with his fine motor skills.  But the toileting is one of the biggest obstacles towards his doing other activities in the coming months and years, since a lot of activities aren’t quite so accommodating  about a child wearing pull-ups.

To boot, the toileting isn’t something covered by his ESY.  I have to imagine that it would perhaps have been something “covered” if we’d sent him to the local school that he had been assigned to, rather than letting him have a summer camp experience, but I’m still willing to accept the regression in the general ed to let him play at being a “normal” kid for a few weeks…

When camp started, we initially started off with sending him in pull-ups after some discussions with his one-on-one, due to the logistics of the camp site – just a lot of hills and whatnot with bathrooms at a distance – and a lack of knowing how he’d cope with the camp toilets.  By the end of last week, when he was routinely having problems not going in the pool, we’d decided to swap him back to cloth briefs to see if that would help.  (We were guessing – as was J – that the issue was that water was relaxing him enough to go.  He was likewise having a problem not using the tub inappropriately during bath time.)

The good news is that he’s not had an accident at camp, it seems, in several days.  Now, he didn’t apparently use the bathroom at all today (which says to us that he’s not drinking enough), and he did have an accident at home this evening… but it seems like he’s getting back into the swing of things when wearing real underwear instead of the disposables.  This is after he has been doing a decent job during outings, and we’re back down to essentially only wearing a pull-up when it’s bed time.

Of course, if he’d go back to telling us that he needs to go – it’s mostly looking for the physical cues, and apparently he’s screaming at J at camp when its time to go – it would be a positive, but I’ll take this much as a good thing…