We are peeing on the potty! (but not pooping...)

It was no small feat for a kid who is quite content to spend the day in a dirty or wet diaper, but we are doing it! Quinn is peeing on the potty! No poop yet, and honestly, no real reason to hope that's going to change any time soon.

Me: "Quinn, where do we go poo-poo?"
Quinn: "On. The. Potty!" (You wouldn't believe the enthusiasm!)
Me: "That's right! And where did you just go poo-poo?"
Quinn: "In. The. Underpants!" (Equal enthusiasm.)

No remorse from this kid. I guess this is the downside to taking the potty training thing nice and easy...

Still, we'll take our successes where we can find them. After all, QUINN IS PEEING ON THE POTTY! After an appalling lack of success with regular reminders, and after discovering the impracticalities of letting him run around naked (it worked, but ONLY when he was naked) we jumped on the prize bandwagon. Oh, my. We had a little basket with some cheap stickers and freebie toys, plus a few toy cars. Within hours the kid had the system licked, and was fishing about for the toy cars. That eventually morphed into demands for toy cars upon peeing, and eventually into determined but not very convincing fake tears when one was not produced. Oops.

So we have moved on to the "prize chart," which was greeted with wailing and desperate cries of "Basket? Toy car?" But finally, a week in, he is on board. He gets a sticker for each time he goes, and works toward prizes - a trip to the "car washer" or the little train ride at the zoo or "Old McDonald's" playland - that was his first choice.

So we're progressing, and we're wearing big boy underpants right out in public. Which is darned inconvenient. It means having to pull over when he says he has to go, spending way too much time in dirty public restrooms and trying to remember to take him to the potty at regular intervals. He's shockingly good about it, and sometimes funny to boot. Yesterday he was trying to pull down his underpants at lunch and was stymied by the drawstring. "Mama," he finally said, quite exasperated. "These pants are locked!"

One year (!) post surgery

Incredibly, it's been an entire year since Quinn's tendon transfer surgery to repair his brachial plexus injury - the "SN" that brought us together. He has almost complete use of his right arm - before the surgery he had almost no use of it - but he still has to be reminded, constantly, to use it.

His one remaining challenge is reaching behind his back, which makes dressing himself quite a challenge. In fact, one reason we decided to go ahead with surgery was meeting an 8-year-old girl with brachial plexus injury who was begging her parents for surgery because she couldn't dress herself, put on her backpack or hang on the monkey bars at school. Anyway, his PT suggested some exercises that didn't really work and I've tried some other things that didn't really work. So not much progress, until about a month ago when I ran into his former feeding therapist, who is the easily most brilliant person I've ever met when it comes to children. "Hmmm," she said, "What could we do?" And on the spot she plopped down on the floor and came up about three exercises THAT ARE WORKING. Incredible. Quinn had no strength to sustain them when we started, but I already see that changing. Score (another) one for the feeding therapist!

We head back to Boston in a couple of weeks for his one-year check up with Dr. Waters. I'll be eager to hear his report, and eager for our strange little family vacation that has become our medical trips to Boston!

The best day ever

If we search the world over for the rest of our lives we probably will never find anything Quinn loves more than the "Keep On Truckin'" show held each year at a local synagogue. All kinds of working vehicles gather in the huge parking lot and kids get to climb aboard.

Operating the lever to lift a garbage can was a BIG hit - and this guy was so nice.

This tour bus driver about had a heart attack when Quinn grabbed his expensive microphone and started talking into it.

Start this baby up!

Guess who came out of here with a black bottom?

Fire truck!

 Oh. My. Lord. Quinn was in true nirvana from the moment we arrived until the moment we left. While he loved it all, we quickly established a pattern: garbage truck, skid steer, fire truck, skid steer, police car, skid steer, front-end loader, skid steer. Luckily, he and the skid steer guy bonded so he patiently lifted him into the cab and lowered the safety bar around him time after time and after after time after...

The biggest smiles were reserved for the skid steer.

More skid steer smiles.

All done wif no?

Quinn has developed a clever little pair of techniques for getting out of trouble as soon as he gets into it: distraction and charm.

When he first started speaking sentences, any time he was corrected - and I mean the tiniest little redirection, like, "Here, Sweetheart, try it this way" or "Let's do that after we put our shoes on" - he would immediately ask, "Go outside?" We kept remarking on how much he loves being outdoors, until - slow parents that we are - we finally noticed that he was trying to distract us so we'd forget the correction. Crafty little kid, this one. In the last week or so, with his language skills expanding, he added an even more effective technique. When corrected, he gets a very sad look on his face, lowers his high-pitched voice and asks very sweetly, "All done wif no?" As predicted, the answer is pretty much always yes.

Are you the little king?

Quinn has become quite obsessed with Old King Cole, which he discovered on TWO different Barney videos. First, he started using my company-issued blue fleece blanket as a cape. Then, one Friday - boy's day - he and Tom (actually, just Tom) spent most of the day making crowns out of manilla envelopes and aluminum foil.

Quinn still mixes up his pronouns, calling himself "you" and everyone else "me," which kinda makes sense since that's how he hears everyone referred to. Anyway, most mornings I get up to find him in his cape and crown in the living room, and when he sees me he looks up and asks, "Are you the little king?" I tell him he's the king of my heart, and he nods, very seriously. Mind you, the picture at the top of this post is an anomaly. When he is in his regal regalia he is VERY serious.

Life, narrated

Now that Quinn is attempting full sentences, we're having a blast hearing what's going on in that head of his. Mostly what we hear is narration. The moment he wakes up in the morning, he starts talking to himself, narrating each and every move he, the dogs or either of us make. "Go see Rosie? Eat? Go for walk? Look! Mama getting out of bed. Mama is putting coat on. Baba is walking up the hill."

Just this week, after MUCH work, he is starting to answer our questions about things that have already happened. What did you do in school today? What game did you and Nana play? What did you do while you were outside?

And just today, he started expanding on those answers, turning them into actual conversations. At dinner tonight he told me that he and Baba watched the sun go down. Now it is dark, he said, but he wanted the sun to go back up in the sky. I told him that the sun would go up, but not until he woke up in the morning. "Sun go up now," he said. Not yet, I told him. Just like you need sleep, the sun is sleeping. We went round and round about that and you could really see him trying to wrap his head around the concept. After dinner, while he was playing with my cell phone, he hit some feature that activated the voice control and the phone invited him to "Say a command." "Tell it to do something," I told him. He looked at the phone and commanded, "Wake up the sun!"

Pee pee on the potty!

 

Every day since last July when I bought this "Cars" potty seat, I have dutifully sat Quinn on top of it. And every time he has dutifully sat there, looked at toy catalogs or played with an envelope of potpourri, and then smiled sweetly at me and announced, "All done potty." Never has he deposited anything in there, mind you. Until now! One night I noticed a drip or two and made a BIG deal out of it. A couple nights later we got a tiny little squirt - bigger deal - and the third night an actual, bonafide pee pee. "Look!" he announced, pointing. "Pee pee come out the penis!" BIG PARTY. All the excitement prompted him to put the potty on his head and christen it a "potty hat." This kid is immature in many ways, but his sense of humor is crazy sophisticated.

Since then he has been doing his thing almost daily -- If I get him to the potty at the right time, he'll go; if not, he'll just use his Pullup (now known as "underpants."). One day he even added a bonus feature: "Poo poo come out the bootie!"

So we're getting there. Finally.