Toilet training

We're on that again. I spent a lot of the last few days looking at sites for parents of SPD kids, and posted a query on a couple of them, asking for advice regarding potty training. I got a variety of responses, most of them basically saying, "Yeah, good luck with that- my kid is 4/5/6 and we're still working on it."

That's so not what I wanted to hear. I don't care about night time dryness right now, I really don't. But every kid in his daycare class, even the ones younger than he is, are using the potty at least some of the time. What makes it a bit harder on me, I think, is the fact that he otherwise presents as a "normal" kid- as in, other people looking at him and wondering why this normal kid is still in diapers. Yes, he is only three and a half, but he goes from preschool into pre-K this fall, and I don't think they let the kids go to pre-K until they're potty trained. Also, next March, when we're looking at kindergarten screening, it'll go worse for us/him if he's not yet trained, as far as him starting the September he turns five instead of the September he turns six. (That's a whole different issue, best covered in another post.)

He now sits on the potty at home for us just fine, although he hasn't done anything in the potty. He fights them on it at school. I took him to the potty at school today, when I picked him up, just before we left, to see what he'd do, and he fought me, too. Tomorrow I am bringing the potty seat we use here (we have two identical ones) to see if that helps with the screaming bloody murder. When I asked him what he thought, he seemed to like the idea- he said the school potty is "cold and hard", while his potty seat is "soft, but still a little cold". Yes, I do realize I am setting us up for him refusing to sit on any potty that doesn't have the Cars theme on it, but I'd rather him at least try to sit on the potty without incident right now.

Just when I think things are really starting to improve for him (and us), we encounter something like this to make me wonder why. Why does he have to have this thing that will color everything he will do his entire life? Why does it have to be something nobody outside the autism community has ever heard of, and we have to explain and re-explain every damn day? I sometimes finding myself wishing he had something quantifiable. I mean, my lung and immune issues, you can look at a CT scan and bloodwork and see what a mess I am. SPD, though...there's no test that can prove to people, "See? It's real!" That, I think, might be the hardest part.