WOW....is the only word we can title this entry

We had our annual Back to School night 2 weeks ago. During the session with Miss Terrific Teacher, she mentioned that we should take a stab at potty training with little man. She had mentioned this in the spring, but husband and I were amazed that she thought he was ready. But you don't earn that title easily so we knew we would give it a try sometime in the near future. He had an occassional morning when he was completely dry and he seemed to have a few patterns of 2 hours dry during the day.

So......

The next morning I got out the potty insert that I've been holding on to for my dear son. Not knowing if he would someday be too big for it when he was ready or perhaps never be potty trained as this is the case for some special needs adults. But I held on to it from the days of potty training princess with a prayerful and hopeful heart. I place little man on the potty, sit down myself and within about 10 seconds of sitting down I hear a water-like sound. What? I look inside the little protector cup and sure enough, he's going potty. WOW. I'm inshock and he's looking at me like what is your deal and then I break into my old potty song and he laughs hysterically. I really wasn't expecting this so I didn't have anything prepared for rewards. Realizing that my song might be close to enough I sang it again and he clapped. In the bathroom we keep this goofy but endearing singing duck. My grandparents like to send the kids those singing animals that you press the button and they light up and sing one of those songs you can't get out of your head for days. They frequent Cracker Barrell and apparently there are a plethora of them there. We usually play it for him when he's in the bathtub, because this one sings "Splish Splash I was taking a bath" in a strange adult like voice. However we stopped because he tends to get overexcited with this toy. So I looked at it and thought, there's a huge reinforcer that he'll love. Let him press the button and he was in heaven. DONE - forget the M&M's and the sticker chart - I have my reinfocer.


So we get ready for school that morning and I proudly write in Jimmo's daily school journal of his success. Around 10:30 I'm sitting in my morning bible study and I see I have a missed call. Because of last year's fall, I jump to the phone very quickly when I see it's from school. Miss Terrific Teacher called to say - "He did it again!". WOW. Could this be true? I never imagined that we would potty train a special needs child this early and it would start so easily. I flutter back into the study and try to listen to my Beth Moore study but I'm just giddy with excitement. Before I pick him up from school, I run into Target to buy some pull up's as the teacher requested. WOW I think to myself. Now we know this is about 80% just dumb luck with timing, but it's still a WOW for us.


I quickly read up on the process suggested by Miss Terrific Teacher since Jimmo is her 20th special needs student she's potty trained. Clearly much experience in this area. The short and skinny is that we'll start with pure schedule training which is set by my watch timer. The objective is to teach the child to wait until he is taken to the potty. This hopefully paves the way towards independent training, where the child understands they have to go and initiates to go to the potty. This whole process could take 6 months to a year - who knows. But we knew we would brace ourselves for a longer potty training.


So for the past two weeks he's gone successfully on the potty about an average of 2/3 times per day between home and school. And then there was the last 24 hours - WOW. He went first thing in the AM before school, which is becoming routine and then went 3 other times at school both #1 and 2 (sorry to be graphic).He then came home and went again and again. Essentially he stayed dry ALL DAY LONG. Seriously - this is unheard of. Miss Terrific Teacher is in shock as well as us. We're so proud and trying to stay focused that this could still be a long process....but WOW. Little man turns 4 years old next Thursday and we would make the guess he's at an overall cognitive level of about 20 months (minus speech since that skews the charts for us). 20 months - WOW.

Sorry to give a "throne" picture, but we thought this one was clean.

Notice our reinfocer looming behind little man!