Progress Report

So it's now been almost a month since the visit at the University. Because Sean was so "clogged up" so to speak, we concentrated mostly on the non-compliance issues with his medication for the first two weeks and only really started dealing with the potty-training after that.

I am very happy to report that Sean has made a TON of progress in both areas! I'm convinced that the simple act of meeting with the doctors and having THEM tell him "man-to-man" that he needs to take his meds without arguing and he needs to stop wearing pull-ups was the single most important factor. (I'm just the mom, what do I know, right?) He still complains about the glycolax from time to time but as long as I give him the choice of water/juice/kool-aid he'll usually pick one within a few minutes and swig it right down. HUGE change from just a few weeks ago!

After a couple of weeks of this, I told Sean I was taking away his pull-ups and he was going to have to wear underwear to school. He still needs them under his Good-Night at bedtime so I couldn't just stop getting them altogether, so I ripped a hole in a bunch of them, rendering them useless (normally at bedtime we rip a small hole in a regular pull-up and then he wears a Good-Night over top of that. It doesn't always work, but it's the best way we've found to keep him completely dry at night. He still makes a lot of pee for an 8-year-old!) I totally expected a huge fight but he didn't argue at all. He's been putting on underwear every morning and even though I warned his teacher and the school nurse and put a change of clothes in his backpack, he hasn't had an accident yet! The little bugger. Apparently he was totally capable of staying dry, he just needed us to force him. He's so stubborn!

For now he's wearing underwear to school and then he still has to poop in order to get the Xbox or computer after school and he sometimes changes into a pull-up then and sometimes he doesn't. After a few more weeks I'll start "accidently forgetting" to buy more pull-ups and we'll see if we can't get him in underwear 100% of the time, and then a few months after that we can start working on the overnight stuff. He hates wetting his bed so I'm pretty sure an alarm of some kind would work well with him.

And one more update: I was asked to fill in at school full-time until the end of the school year and the cynic in me knew as soon as I said yes Mark would probably get a job offer and sure enough, within two days he was offered something at AccountTemps. He starts that tomorrow so we're back to both of us working full-time. We expect Grace to be fairly unhappy going to the sitter again but it's only for a few weeks so she'll just have to deal with it. She's pretty spoiled after being at home with Dad for two months! :) He's a very good Daddy but he's not very good with the discipline and he keeps feeding her cheese curls and brownies for lunch! So I suspect she's not going to like the change.

The only bad thing about the new job is one, it's not permanent (yet) and two, we were scheduled to go to Camp Sunshine next week and now we can't. :( I was so excited that they finally had an option for people on our side of the country (normally it's held in Maryland but now they're starting one in Wisconsin) and I'm totally bummed that we can't go. I guess I could have tried to take the kids by myself but the whole point of Camp Sunshine is to involve the whole family so I kind of didn't want to do that. Even though we're not going anymore you should still check out the website. Hopefully we can go next year. http://www.campsunshinewisconsin.org/

Until next time!

Laurie