Celebrating Little Successes

Potty training for most people entails a few weeks or months of frustration, then enjoyment of the results.  For us, it is taking years.  Something about autism seems to make potty training - especially where poo is concerned - an especially difficult task.  Bribery may work, but what do you do when the kid doesn't like candy?  It's not like I could say, "Go poo and I'll give you a bagel." That seemed a little unreasonable.  But we've tried for more than two years to get this kid potty trained, (he'll be 5 next month) and he just wasn't at all concerned about it.  He is finally pretty consistent about peeing in the toilet, and he tells us (in his own way) when he needs to go. We get statements like this when we're in the car: "When we get to Grammy's house, we can go potty."  That can be translated, "Find me a bathroom ASAP, I need to go right now."

Last night, I knew he needed to go poo, but he is always afraid to do it in the toilet.  I don't think he has ever done it before.  We won a major battle a month or so ago when we convinced him to ask for a pull-up when he needs to poo so I could quit having to clean nastiness out of his underwear.  (I confess more than one pair were just thrown away).

Knowing he needed to go (he had asked for a pull up), I let him stand to pee as usual, then put him up on the toilet and blocked him from getting down.  I told him, "Please, please, please go poo in the toilet.  If you do I'll get you a Mater car when we go to Jackson tomorrow.  He didn't want a Mater car.  He told me, "I need a tractor."  So I said, "Okay, I'll get you a tractor."  He went poo.  I celebrated.  We all did.  And today he picked out a $24 tractor and trailer set, brought it home and immediately filled it with farm animals and a made a Lego man drive (with his dog on the hood) :)  So I'm thinking, now what do I do for an encore?  I'm starting to think I may have been the sucker in this deal.  I'm definitely going to have to push this issue a little harder.  I'm just glad we've finally had a little success.  And here's the bonus - he picked the only tractor in the store that DIDN'T have any buttons to push to make noise!