It’s been a few days since I wrote, mostly since I’ve been busy with a couple of things offline – between Halloween and schedule conflicts for the wife and me, it’s been a very full boat.  Yesterday and today, I’ve been home rather than at work, since the Monster had the days off of school for an in-service day and then the election.

But one thing that’s been going on in the interim has been the issue of getting the Monster further toilet trained.

We’re not quite up to, yet, trying to get him to go during the night.  For now, we’ve been concentrating on trying to deal with the poop issue.

As I mentioned a while back, there was the issue of his having an accident at school.  The Monster seems to be somewhat reluctant to say something with warning before he needs to go in that direction, and there’s the possibility that he’s just holding it in as long as he can.  That’s not really all that healthy, and so we’ve been trying to figure out – without success – how to encourage him to go.  Rewards don’t work, and yelling doesn’t work…

Last week, the wife took the Monster for an evaluation in preparation to get him back into behavioral therapy like he was before.  The toileting was a major issue she brought up, and there was a discussion on how to handle it.

Basically, we’re moving to more of a ‘stick’ approach – if he has an accident, he’s having a larger share of the lifting to get cleaned up afterwards.  Previously, we just cleaned him up (and grumbled about it) and got him changed.  Now, if he has an accident, we’re making him do more of the cleaning, to then go upstairs and get new briefs and pants as necessary…

And I’ll admit that I was skeptical.  He’s not exactly shown that he really has much cognizance of the fact that this is a problem.

But looking at the chart of his behavior, we’ve actually had two successes in the last week with his going to the bathroom in time to catch himself.  On most of his accidents, if we’re not the one catching him, he tries at least to go in and do some of the cleaning.  So if the trend continues, and this is wishful thinking, I’m hoping that he’ll start showing more independence (and hopefully less waiting) with his going to the bathroom…