[Bewildering update to this post available here.]
This has been the roller-coaster week from Helena, and this morning got off to a rip-roaring start, as if we needed that.
You may remember from the Houdini post that J-Man is the David Blaine of sleep clothes. One minute he’s clothed and then you blink and everything he’s wearing is piled on the floor and he’s jumping up and down in the bed butt nekkid. Thankfully, David Blaine hasn’t tried that on prime time TV yet.
So we had given up on two-piece pajamas for a while and have been cramming him back into sleepers again. The stress of having to run into his room the second he woke up in the morning to prevent endless sheet washing just got old. His sleepers are zippered and snapped and fit him so snugly that it’s hard for him even to completely straighten out. He’s chewed on the neck area of them a lot, but they’ve stayed on and always zippered up, which has thankfully thwarted any more ecstatic fits of aerobic urination in the bed.
Well, at least until this morning.
I was running around trying to get stuff ready for school when I heard him doing his jumping, cackling banshee thing in the bed. Usually this is a really bad sign, but given that he was in a sleeper, I didn’t even think about him getting out of it.
At least until I went inside his room.
There he was down to his bare necessities with his sleeper and diaper all wadded up in the floor. But it gets worse.
Just so you know, one of the worst sentences you’ll ever utter as a parent – especially in a dark room – is, “what’s that on the floor?” [insert click of light switch and loud invocation of multiple deities here]
Along with his sleeper and diaper, he had left a little present in the floor. I don’t think I need to say anything more.
After an initial “DEAR LORD!!!”, we had a pretty good laugh about it. After all, he did somehow figure out how to unsnap a snap and unzip a zipper and manipulate his body to get out of the sleeper. From an occupational therapy, fine motor planning perspective, that’s quite an achievement.
I just wish we could have accomplished that with fewer bodily functions, that’s all.
Posts that hopefully are similar:
- Not the Fine Motor Achievement We Had In Mind – UPDATED (with the most bizarre twist ever)
- I’m not wearing pants!
- Houdini
- One Inch Closer
- Are You Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?
- Bathtub Artist
- You Kinda Get Used to Weeks Like This
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
From the point of view of someone who didn’t have to clean it up, that’s hilarious!
Ha! Ok, sorry. I did have to laugh though!
I know you probably get tons of unwarranted advice, but just a thought.
If he has a hard time w/ snaps, maybe you could get a snap-closure cloth diaper and put it on him backwards at night?
Better yet, get a fitted w/ snaps and a cover w/ snaps, put both backwards. He’d have to go through 2 layers of snaps on his back that way in order to get out of it – no small feat for any three year old!
@all – It was meant to be funny, so laugh away! You have to laugh at stuff like this or else you go bonkers.
@kb – We’re happy to get most any advice. We can always ignore it if need be.
We don’t have any cloth diaper stuff here at the house, but getting a snap cover to experiment with sounds like something worth trying.
His ability with snaps varies a lot depending on the type of snap and how they are positioned. It seems like he has a harder time pulling a snap that requires him to pull across his body (the sleeper snap goes across his neck). If it’s a snap that would come undone with pulling up or down (or even worse, just by pulling the fabric around the snap), then that would be easy for him. I would think a backwards snap cover would be in the much harder category. He generally tries to take off a diaper just by rolling it down from the waist, sort of like you might do with wet swim trunks. So the cover would need to be nearly impossible to just roll down.
Back on a previous post (the Houdini one I think), Lori had a great idea too. She suggested cutting the feet off an old sleeper and putting the sleeper on him backwards with the zipper on his back. The more we think about it, the more brilliant that sounds. We might try her idea next since we already have a couple of sleepers with holy feet that could be cut up.
I think the snap cover may be our next course of action after that. The nearest store that sells cloth diaper stuff is halfway across town and I’d want to look at our options in person rather than just ordering one online blind. If you have suggestions for a good brand, let us know.
Thanks!
Behold! The Great Poo-dini!!
Better hurry—I’m telling you fingerpaint is coming—-BTDT, and you DON’T wanna join the seasoned ranks. I can’t belive he’s still up to these tricks! Would a distraction in his crib work?—like a doll or stuffed animal with little clothes on—-maybe he would undress that instead?
@Lori – The problem is that he doesn’t interact with dolls at a level that’s any different from how he interacts with furniture or grass. This is where parents of autistic kids have to create a whole new bag of tricks. There was a period where putting a stuffed animal in there would get him to chew on it rather than his clothes, but that stopped working when he refused to allow anything in his crib while he’s in it.
Plus he doesn’t equate other things wearing clothes as being related to him wearing clothes. This is actually something they work on in school. It falls under the heading of “pretend play” which autistic kids don’t do well at all. Gathering up the bears and having a pretend party just doesn’t occur to most of them. Life tends to be very literal.
Often we’re left with figuring out how our kid does something incomprehensible like this and then engineering – literally – a solution to thwart it. You think this problem is vexing. I know a parent who actually had to retrofit their kid’s crib with the most elaborate construction project I’ve seen in years in order to prevent him from escaping it and wandering around the house at night or injuring himself while in it. I think he actually has blueprint drawings of it. In comparison, ours is a trivial issue.
One of the phrases you utter a lot as a parent of an autistic kid is, “Well, the problem could be worse,” because you invariably meet someone for whom the mountain is much harder to climb. We often consider ourselves fortunate that some crap on the floor is the most pressing thing we have to address.
Still, we have to figure out the problems in front of us, and this beats the heck out of me.
So you’re saying that at this age there is no understanding of “clothing” as a concept—-just a cognizant realization that he doesn’t want to wear any? That makes sense—-I was never a good “pretender” myself—I never knew WHAT dolls or animals ought to say to one another!
I do know what you mean about the comparisons we make. We had friends in our FL church who have a severly autistic son with mental retardation as well. He is about 10-12 yo now. They also had to put a “cage” contraption on the lower bunk to keep him in and safe at night. He was getting very big, not toilet trained, etc. It is a very difficult life for all of them, and they are in my personal book of heroes. So yes, it could always be “worse”, but I think you and Mary appear to be doing a fine job of helping him navigate through life as successfully as possible. Those smiles in his pictures say so much—keep up the good work!