Saturday, 18 February 2012

Bed Wars: Alex 5, Duct Tape 0



It’s official.  My son is stronger than duct tape.  He’s ripping through in less than twenty minutes now which means patches don’t last long enough to let him fall asleep.  Not to mention it means we can’t put him in his room for a time-out without him destroying the mattress.  He’s going after the plastic undersheet so that he can rip it into tiny pieces. 

We’re shifting to a whole new approach.  Rather than trying to protect the mattress from bed-wetting, I’m getting something I can wash relatively easily.  A king sized duvet.  Or rather, three of them, which should let us rotate them through.  I’ve folded it over three times for the maximum amount of padding.

Unfortunately, it’s still pretty darn thin.  I’ve tucked a camping mattress which is about an inch and a half thick underneath.  We’ll see if he ends up destroying the mattress but there’s still not a lot between him and the bed.  And I have to figure out how to protect the nicely absorbent chip-board, too.  I’m thinking of shellacking it.

You can’t ever give up.  We’re still trying to find larger diapers but the ones designed to deal with bed-wetting are more for leakage than floods.  There are adult medical incontinence diapers (which are expensive) but the smalls are too big for him.  I’m still taking him to the toilet before I go to bed and we’ve had some small successes with that.

What’s frustrating is that we’re off the parenting map.  Even the autism parenting map since even most autistic children are toilet trained when they’re younger than Alex.  There isn’t a guidebook on how to deal with this.  The parents who can’t toilet train their children (and it is a not-insignificant percentage) are left on their own to figure out how to manage their child as he or she grows.

Alex has the skills to do this.  He’s just not motivated.  Shame doesn’t work since he’s not particularly socially conscious.  And the accidents don’t bother him.  All we can do is keep trying to encourage him and hope he eventually gets it.

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