Being helpful

It’s just after 8am and I feel like I’ve done a days work already! It reminds me of my nanny days where sometimes we were up so early that it seemed to take forever for the world to wake up at 9am.

I’ll start with this photo because the rest will be about toileting, and you may wish to skip it!

We have had robot hoovers on and off in our lives for over 12 years now. I did have a cleaner for approx 7 years but we decided that it was hoovering that we needed most and we could manage the rest. So I invested in first one robot hoover, then another - one upstairs and one downstairs - Uppy and Downy.

Every day they both run around and keep my house looking lovely. With two children and three cats and with tutors and SLTs in my house every week, it’s my necessity and my sanity.

However one Downy wasn’t happy this morning, so my day began doing brain surgery - or more like wheel surgery - to work out what was stuck underneath the wheel. Out came a chunk of Christmas tree and the top plastic ring of a glucose tablet pot! Thankfully I managed to get the wheel back into its housing afterwards.

However there was a big mess in the floor as Rosie removed the waste bin upside down. So Toby without asking noticed the mess, ran off and returned with the handheld hoover and cleaned it all up. He then continued by hoovering up in the kitchen.

So, why were we up early? Toby was toilet trained really late. We tried hard for about 2 years when he was approx 6-7 (after he initiated it), and he was dry for a while but he regressed until we gave up because it was causing issues in school. A wise friend told me that her son had toilet trained himself when he was 8 and he was clean almost instantly. It makes sense if you halve the age if 8 to 4, because a 4 year old is easy to toilet train compared to a 2-3 year old. I was despairing as Toby headed towards 9, but 3 months before his 9th birthday he suddenly ditched his pull up’s and we were away.

He was dry but he didn’t want to poo. This is very common with boys - I’ve toilet trained many children and boys can be tricky. Anyway Toby used to go over a week before he had no choice. But his behaviour was awful. He didn’t want to sit, concentrate, would just sit endlessly on the toilet. It was awful. Especially at school. We would get leaks and more. At the start of the pandemic it was ridiculous. By this stage he was on medication which still didn’t really help. One medicine was meant to regularise whilst the other helped release. They just didn’t work.

Then the pandemic hit. Toby was at home. Amazingly he sorted himself out!! So we have had 2 years of hardly any problems. We had the occasional accident. However something has clearly changed in the last few weeks and he’s holding on again. We get tears and refusing to eat. This time the medication is helping, and that’s why we were up early…..at 6am…..because of the smell!!! 💩