Josiah's Journey

Help arrived yesterday.  In a box.  $9.95 of plastic that will revolutionize my life. I'm not sure why I hadn't thought of  it sooner.  I don't know why I didn't look for a solution like this long ago.  My life would have been much simpler.  But no regrets.  I'm just so happy it's here now and so far Josiah seems not to mind much.  Rick slipped the urine guard on the toilet and it fit perfectly.  I was surprised to see Josiah sitting  with the urine guard in place, quite contented yesterday afternoon.  Not how I had pictured it.  Change isn't always easy for him.  I figured he'd refuse to sit.  I knew he would throw it.  I thought for sure he would dangle it in the toilet water.  I wasn't positive but I thought he might even try chewing on it.  Never expected he would just plop down and sit. 

We have a somewhat complicated bathroom routine for Josiah.  He's on a toileting schedule.  Even at 9 years of age he does not seem to know when he has to go.  So every hour and a half, we take him.  We show him a picture card with a toilet on it and announce, "Potty Time"  then take his hand and lead him to the bathroom.  He needs verbal prompts to turn on the light and to put the toilet card by the sink.  He doesn't have the dexterity yet to unsnap or unzip his pants, so we do that for him.  Often times he will just stand there like that and stare, pants unzipped, doing nothing.   Though we've been doing this seemingly forever and one would think he would know exactly what to do by now, he doesn't always.   Most days he does, but other times he just stands.  We say, "Pants down" and wait.  If he hesitates then we put his hands on his pants, again reminding him, "Pants down".  If that is not effective, we physically prompt him through the process of pulling down his pants, our hands over his, while once again repeating, "Pants down".  Then he sits. 

We have a large 5 minute sand timer in the bathroom.  When Josiah stands prematurely which he often does, we show him the timer and tell him to sit back down.  We used to keep his favorite treats in the bathroom.  If he stayed seated, every few seconds, we'd announce, "Good sitting" and give him a small piece of an Oreo Cakester.  If he did anything in the toilet, we'd celebrate and allow him to eat all the rest of his cookie. This didn't work as well as we had hoped.  It got to the point where Josiah would take us to the bathroom and quickly sit down on the commode whenever he wanted a snack. I think he really thought this is the room where they feed me.

I'm not sure Josiah is making the connection with the bathoom and what is expected of him in there even now.  But he does have occasional success.  By success I mean something comes out.  Until yesterday, it almost always shot right across the room, smacking the wall and sliding down into a puddle on the floor.  Try as we might, we could not teach the boy to aim down.  So bathroom visits also became cleaning visits, for mom.  We tried having him stand.  Not pretty.  Josiah likes to climb.  He tried his very best to climb IN that toilet as often as he could.  I knew there had to be a better way.  I think we have it now.

After Josiah goes to the bathroom or his 5 minutes of sitting is up, we begin the whole prompting sequence again to get him to stand and pull up his pants.  Dad or I zip and snap them.  After flushing, the hand washing routine begins.  We go through all the steps in the process: "Water on"  "Get soap" "Rub hands" "Water off"  "Get Towel"  "Dry hands", each one of these requiring any or all of the following steps: a verbal command, a verbal command with a gesture (usually pointing), a verbal command with a physical prompt (us starting the process for him) and finally the verbal command with us hand over hand following through with the task.  Then it's "Light off" and out we go. The whole process can last anywhere from 10 - 20 minutes.  Then we do it again.  Every hour and a half.

 In the back of my mind I had always hoped Josiah would be completely trained by age 5.  We met a man when Josiah was young who had a son with Down Syndrome.  He told us that his son wasn't trained until age 8.  So I added a few years to my estimate, sure that it really couldn't take that long.

Last week I met a woman who's daughter was not trained until age 10.  I'll  keep you posted.