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.

@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!