Potty Training

We have unofficially started potty training Finn. Several months ago, we started taking off his diaper before bath time and trying to get him to pee in the toilet. It worked once. After that one time, he would refuse to pee in the toilet and as soon as I would give up trying to get him to go, he would walk over to the rug and pee on it instead. Naturally, I got tired of having to wash the rug all the time and when I didn't have time to wash it, the bathroom would stink to high heaven, so we gave up.

But in the last week of May, Ben suggested that we give it another go. We had success right away and Finn was so thrilled with peeing in the toilet, that I thought, "Maybe we could try this during the day?" So anytime I was going to change his diaper, I said in a very excited voice, "Let's go potty!!!!!" Finn would race to the bathroom and wait by the toilet for me to get him up on the stool and get his diaper off. I started buying pull-ups to make the process go more smoothly. His control is getting very good. He definitely waits for me to get his diaper off before he starts going. I don't think he recognizes the sensation that he has to go, though.

Then, on May 31, Finn hollered at me and I could see that he was about to poop. I asked if he wanted to go on the potty and he pointed at the bathroom. So I grabbed him up with a book and ran off to the bathroom and he sat down on the toilet and had his first poop in the potty. He didn't seem distressed by it at all. Actually I think he found getting to read a book on the toilet highly entertaining because he often will grab a book and want to read it sitting on the toilet, even when he doesn't have to go.

On the next poop occasion, we didn't make it to the potty in time, but tonight as Ben and Finn were playing, Ben suggested that Finn might need to go. (I think Finn must have been doing a lot of tooting in Ben's face). So off we went to sit and read and sure enough, it happened again!

So we're feeling good so far by how stress-free its been for all of us. Of course we aren't expecting anything from him yet and he still requires us to help him with the whole process, but its a start and since my expectation had been that it would be absolute nightmare, I am pleasantly surprised and pleased that it has been so easy so far.

The one thing that I find funny about all this is that this is the first childhood milestone I haven't prepared for by reading a book or searching through dozens of online articles. I am flying by the seat of my pants for the first time as a parent. Hmm....Maybe I can follow my own instincts and my child's lead and everything will turn out fine!

The last few weeks have been rough as evidenced by this conversation

Ben (to Finn): Your grandma and grandpa need to come visit.

Me: You think we could convince your parents to come down this summer? (Pause) Or were those not the grandparents you had in mind?

Ben: I don't even care at this point.

Vitamins

I have been trying to get Finn to take a gummy vitamin for nearly a year now with absolutely no success. But recently Finn has started wanting to do everything that Daddy does. So, now when Daddy takes his gummy vitamin, he gives one to Finn, and of course Finn just gobbles it up and asks for another one. Somehow he knows that Daddy doesn't take the DHA gummy vitamin, though, and he has steadfastly refused to take that one. I thought maybe it was just a fun novelty to Finn and the new shine would wear off quickly, but so far we have a week of successful vitamin ingestion under our belts. We will have to use this Daddy magic to our advantage for as long as it lasts. Some day the tides will change and he will only want to do the opposite of anything his parents do.

New Words

We are still waiting to hear from our case manager regarding Finn's eligibility for speech therapy services, but in the meantime Finn has started saying a few new words for us. His latest have been: Ball, balloon, wa-wa (water), and bubble. Occasionally he will say one of these words at random, but most of the time we have to ask him to say things for us. Today I was changing his diaper and asking him if I should just let him run around with a bare bottom and he repeated "bottom" several times for me and just laughing and laughing. We'll see if we can get him to say it again tomorrow!

We're coming along on animal noises too. The wolf (or wild thing) howls, the pig snorts, and the kitty says "ow-mow" apparently. I wonder what the neighbors think of all the animal noises coming from our apartment?

Finn is making leaps and bounds in his progress of identifying body parts. He now knows exactly where his eyes, ears, nose, mouth, elbow, knee (or owie), belly button, leg, and hair is. He loves to point out Daddy's beard. Although he will only put up with us asking where certain body parts are so many times. He gets exasperated and I get the feeling that he can't understand how his parents can't seem to remember where their ears are!

Speech Regression

In the back of my mind for the past couple weeks, I have been noticing that Finn has stopped saying new words. Yesterday, after reading an article about Regressive Autism (something I didn't even know existed) it struck me full in the face that not only was Finn not saying any new words, but he wasn't saying any of his old words either. Suddenly, alarm sirens were going off in my head and I was on high alert, scrutinizing Finn's every sound and action. I haven't felt this anxious about my son's well-being since he was a newborn.
After about a day and a half I calmed down enough to realize that Finn was not showing any signs of autism or regression in any other areas of his development. It seems to be limited to his verbal abilities. Ben and I agreed that the responsible thing to do was call the doctor, even if that meant someone telling us we were crazy, over-concerned parents. She told us to call the local early intervention program, which I did and got bumped around to several different departments until I was finally able to leave a voice mail for someone to call me back.  It was the longest voice mail greeting I had ever sat through. They wanted me to leave so much information, I had to take notes! They never called back, so I'm thinking that after I got done giving all our names, spellings, dates of birth, address, favorite colors and shoe sizes, I forgot to leave my phone number. This wouldn't surprise me at all. I think I'm now at that level of sleep-deprivation that causes permanent brain damage.  So after waiting a couple weeks (during which time I tried to talk myself out of it, but my sense of responsibility nagged at me) I called again and remembered to leave my phone number and got a call back that very day. I was able to set up an appointment to have a couple therapists to come for a home visit to evaluate Finn. It was probably best for Finn to be in his home environment to get the best evaluation, but it meant an awful lot of work for me in the cleaning department. Its generally all I can do to keep up with the superficial housework that needs to be done for us not to drown in a sea of dirty dishes, laundry and crumbs. I doubted I'd get the opportunity to explain to the evaluators that I'm just trying to strengthen my child's immune system one mold spore and dust bunny at a time, so I neglected Finn for a couple days and deep cleaned until I was dead on my feet!

The evaluation went well in that Finn was very charming and engaging and scored at or above his age level on nearly all the assessments. But with speech he demonstrated a 50% delay in verbal ability. To put it in perspective the therapist told me that in reasoning, problem-solving,

and language comprehension he is functioning at a 2 1/2 year old level. But in his verbal ability he is at a ten-month old level. The evaluators reassured me that he shows no signs of autism and even did an extended autism evaluation just to be thorough. 

 

So as relieved as Ben and I are that Finn is developing normally in nearly all areas, we're still feeling the heavy weight of this speech delay. I don't think either of us expected it to be that bad. Unfortunately, its left us with more questions than answers, the worst of which for me is, "Why?" I am the one staying home and raising this child, if this delay is caused by something lacking in his home environment, then I am at fault. I feel like I need to know if there was something more I should have been doing or if this is just the way Finn is and even if we had worked with flash cards and I had overcome my introverted nature and talked incessantly to him all day and banned all screen time and let him cry-it-out so that he got 12 hours of uninterrupted sleep every night, he would still have been delayed in his verbal skills. I just don't know, and it bothers me.

According to the early intervention paperwork I received, children under 24 months that show a 33% delay in one area of development will qualify for services. Now we have to wait to hear from our case manager to find out what the next step is. I am assuming (and hoping) that it will be a more in-depth evaluation that will determine why he isn't talking. And once we know what's going on, they can refer us to the appropriate therapist. I haven't done much online research on speech issues yet, since I don't know what I'm looking for, but what little I have seen suggests that speech issues are among the easiest to correct when caught early. It is reassuring to know that we took the appropriate steps early on, and hopefully in a few years we'll wonder how we ever worried that he didn't talk enough!

Howling with the Wild Things

As I've mentioned before, Finn's favorite book is "Hugless Douglas," but a close second is "Where the Wild Things Are." In the middle of the book, during the "wild rumpus" there are three pages of just pictures. Now for some reason, Ben and I couldn't just leave them as pictures to look at but felt we had to add some sounds to go along with them. So when the wild things are howling at the moon, Ben and I howl, when they are swinging through the trees, we say "whee, wheee," and when they are marching in a line we sing the conga line tune. Last night when Ben and I started howling, Finn joined in and howled along. This was hilarious and awesome but then we tried to turn the page and move on but Finn would have none of it, and turned the page back to the howling page. We howled some more and tried to continue the story, but no, back we went. We howled and howled and howled until I was certain the dogs across the street would join in and the neighbors would call the cops. Ben practically had to wrestle Finn just to turn the page and continue the story. I fear this was so much fun for Finn that howling at the moon will become part of our bedtime routine....

A Barbershop Trio

Lately Finn has taken to waking up at 5 am. Since I still get very little sleep, Ben has graciously started taking over the morning shift and watching Finn while I go back to bed and try to catch an hours nap. This morning they crawled in bed with me at about 7 and I was trying to wake up. For some unknown reason, Ben decided to sing "Ahh" and for some other unknown reason I sang "Ahh" a third higher and then right on cue Finn opened his mouth and sang "Ahh" a perfect third higher than me! It was a perfect major triad and a beautiful way to wake up in the morning! We all had a wonderful laugh over it and then tried again, but Finn gave us some very strange notes that resulted in weird minor chords so I don't think I can claim that my child has perfect pitch yet.