The other day I just had to blog about the subject of poo, something that no one likes to talk about, an almost taboo subject so to speak, but when raising an autistic child it is something that cannot be avoided.
Well I really do not like talking about poo, it's not one of my most favourite subjects really but it certainly needs to be discussed. The problems of pooing on the toilet are I know, not only unique to my son who is aged 5 .
This past weekend has been the house of poo.
On Saturday Tom refused to leave the house giving me the reason that 'it's too dangerous'. This is the reason he gives when he never wants to do anything. Anyway both boys were rather tired so we spent the day at home and to be honest had a lovely day, apart from the whole poo issue.
Tom will quite happily wee in the toilet, this hurdle has now been conquered and we are all extremely proud of him but he still refuses to poo on the toilet or rather poo anywhere as he holds it in. This is I think for a number of reasons.
He thinks it will hurt him as he has told me, 'it will hurt my bottom' and then there is the issue of the water splashing him. He will sit on the toilet, once I can persuade him, but this is not the issue, so what do you do? I really don't know to be honest.
The wonderful Aukids magazine gave a link to a fantastic Australian video entitled, 'Tom's Toilet Triumph' in their magazine, which you can view here. I have shown this to Tom now several times, he wanted to watch it again tonight, and he was absolutely fascinated, he was quiet the entire time and then said, 'again', I really think that the sharing of the name Tom helps.
I just hoped that by him watching the cartoon and seeing that everybody has to poo and that it does not hurt that it might in a way persuade him to go to the toilet. However this did not happen over the weekend.
He sat at one point quite happily for half an hour on the toilet and although he needed to do a poo, he resisted. However although frustrating for me I suppose he was happy to sit there.
So where do we go from here? I am not too sure to be honest. We have a toilet book that I made which he looks at, we have PECS on the toilet wall and he knows what he should do; the problem is that he does not want to do it.
I stumbled across a post on twitter this evening by the charity Cerebra that showed a leaflet about toilet training a child with autism. When reading it I realised just how far we have come on our toileting journey and that I should focus upon this, the positives and that change will happen, we are after all heading in the right direction.
I am going to ask school though if they can do a 'poo' social story as there is no harm in trying new things but I really just think that I need to try and stay calm and just go with it, hopefully then it will just happen.
That's the plan anyway.
UPDATE
The school did make a fantastic social story all about poo and hopefully this will help. Tom happily sat and read it to me so at least that is a start.