Tristan’s IEP meeting was on Monday. It was infinitely less painful than last year’s, probably due to our growing familiarity with the system, the lack of testing necessary, and the fact that it only took an hour. Tristan’s services, will remain mostly the same for next year, except for OT being put on consult rather than receiving an hour per week of service. He will be in the same special education class and attending speech therapy as well as a social skills class. The folks who have been working with Tristan seem to have a good picture of his strengths and weaknesses, so that encourages me.

For the past two days, Tristan has decided to poop directly into the toilet. I’m so proud! I really hope he keeps this trend up and it’s not just a fluke.

Tristan has started playing Super Mario Bros as of yesterday! James busted out an emulator version on his computer and showed Tristan how to walk while he did the jumping. Soon, they graduated to James’s old Nintendo DS and Tristan began to learn to play on his own. Granted, he’s not great yet, but it’s only been one day and none of us were great at playing within our first day and we started older than 3 and a half.

Now, video gaming is most certainly not the way to athletic success, but nobody in this household is successful athletically, so that’s fine with us. We’re a geek household and we’ve been waiting for this day for about as long as I waited to take a mommy-baby bike ride. Tristan has officially reached the age where he’s more of a kid than a baby and it’s been really nice to spend the cooperative time with him. Now, to get him playing some RPGs..

Tristan is very, very resistant to the idea of pooping in a toilet even still. I’m fairly sure we’re going to make it to age 4 pooping in pull-up diapers. (And sleeping in them, but I don’t expect that any time soon; he has less control over it.) However, this week is the beginning of “shitting takes place in the bathroom.” I won’t give him a pull-up to poop in unless he is in a bathroom. I’ve been parking Kirianna outside the bathroom, giving Tristan his iPad to entertain himself, and waiting it out.

Tristan is, unfortunately, NOT ready to be independent in the bathroom with the door closed for any amount of time. I’m sure that if he wanted to, he could handle it, but after what happened this week, he can freaking wait. We have a tube of hydrocortisone ointment for a persistent rash he has on his leg; it’s kept in the diaper/underwear bin for ease of use. He closed the door and I let him alone for about 3 minutes. During that time, he took out the tube of ointment, got up by the sink, squeezed that shit everywhere, and started flooding the floor. Guess who gets supervised for a while? He had some fun helping me clean that mess up.

Today was fairly easy with the poop-speriment. He finished up about 3 minutes after I installed him in the bathroom with his entertainment and parked outside to breastfeed his sister. Then he wanted to sit in it and continue playing his game instead of having me clean him up to return to the living room. Prior to today, he spent close to an hour each time before deciding to release his bowels into the diaper. So we have a change in behavior toward the goal!

We’ve been abusing the power of the iPad (or P-Apple, as it is still often called around here) to manage having two kids. Tristan loves to play all versions of Angry Birds, but he’s just learning that you should complete the board and be assigned 1-3 stars for your score. He still mostly resets the game prematurely, though. He plays Uno fairly well for a 3 year old, since he understands his numbers and colors and how to follow directions regarding such. He irritates the shit out of me with a game called Touch Physics, which has you draw objects in order to affect the movement of some other object toward a star – he isn’t very fast with it, and I don’t know how to play it, so he gets frustrated and either I’m nursing his sister and can’t help, or hell, I’m no help anyway. He’s also been playing Pocket Tanks, which involves shooting shit and making it explode, to which he exclaims, “Oh no!” Oh yes, Misunderstood Pigs, which is a spoof on Angry Birds where you play from the pigs’ perspective; same “Oh no!” every time something in the game falls down.

The past two days, we’ve also been biking, since I can exercise again and he’s been getting decent on his balance bike. Yesterday, I had him out on a bike with flat tires because I completely forgot to check. James had mentioned that Tristan was not as fast on the bike as he used to be; we figured that he was just out of practice after a hiatus. Turns out it’s kind of hard to balance on a bike with flat tires! Today we went back out with his tires fixed and I actually had to sprint on my bike to keep up with him at times and make sure he didn’t run into traffic. I’ll take him out to actually go places instead of riding around the parking lot when he follows my directions or my path enough to stay out of cars’ way, or perhaps I can toss a bike rack on my car and drive the bikes somewhere. I’ve been waiting for almost 4 years to be able to bike with my kid, so yay!

Tristan is adjusting very well to having a little sister. He doesn’t lose his shit when I hold her anymore, or even when I nurse her – although he is a complete punk about trying to steal my nursing pads. He gives Kirianna kisses, comments on her crying without seeming resentful, and can even sleep through it when she’s very fussy.

Two things that Tristan used to love are messing with him these days: the wind and music. He was formerly fascinated by wind and loved to watch trees, etc. swing and feel the wind in his hair. A while ago (when I got my new car) he started getting upset when the windows were open, and for that I do not blame him as the wind was far more tolerable with my old car. However, these past few months, he’s refused to play outside and has gotten very mad even when going from car to store if it was “too windy.” With regard to the music, when he was very little he would enjoy when we would sing to him; that hasn’t been the case for several months now unless it’s a kids’ song or a couple of other non-kids’ songs. These past couple of weeks he’s been asking for the music in the car to be turned off in most cases, but he does have some preferences. He’s learning to ask for a song called “The Cross” by a band called Within Temptation, and he has some tolerance for rock with a female lead singer.

On March 11th, Tristan’s little sister Kirianna was born. Tristan doesn’t like her much quite yet. We hear that’s pretty normal, though.

We got home from the hospital on the 13th. Tristan did very well without me there for a few days. But he is very jealous of the baby whenever I am the one holding her. He can handle it when anyone else has her, but for some reason she represents a threat to him when I’m caring for her. He says the following:

“Baby sister Kirianna stand up?”

“Baby sister Kirianna go lay down in the bed please?”

“Bye, Kirianna!”

One thing that has made his life easier has been the visit with Grandma and Aunt Cindy. Both of them have given him tons of personal attention and have made him feel less scared in this new situation. He’s gotten rather attached to both of them and knows to ask for them by name. In fact, he has spent lots of time hugging on them and refusing to hug me (in an “in the mood for them” way, not in an “I don’t like you anymore” way, if that makes sense). It really warms me to see him getting attached to family like that – it’s great to have family, and even more great that he gets attached to specific people and decides to form a real bond with them.

We were sick a couple of weeks ago and Tristan got in the habit of requesting that his dad carry him to the bathroom. Just now, we told Tristan that daddy would pick him “up, up, up” to go to the toilet. He perked up at the prospect.. and then got up and ran himself to the bathroom. Punkbutt baby..

So, Tristan is using underwear during most of his awake time. We started in the last week of December so he’d have some time to get used to it before going back to school. He has the peeing thing down – he has pee accidents here and there, but they really distress him, and he has learned the general process of holding it in. He doesn’t request to go to the toilet at home very often still; we have to offer him the chance. But we’re done with having to take him on a strict schedule to make sure he puts pee into the toilet.

He’s still not independent about the whole process. Someone has to go with him and talk him through the process, or at least supervise him through it. I think he is capable of doing it on his own but likes the extra support. After all, he can put his own clothing on except for getting fronts and backs right, and remembering to pull up the underwear before the pants. I figure that he’s pretty good about asserting independence when he’s confident, but that is a crucial step.

Pooping has been making very, very small progress. We’ve gotten him to poop in the toilet several times but he is frankly averse to it at this point. We’ve taken to providing him a pull-up diaper when we know he really has to go. He will ask to go to the toilet when he needs to poop and is in underwear, but he will not actually release his bowels into the toilet if he can help it. It’s also fairly irritating to clean up poop when it all lands in his underwear, because he yanks his underwear down and manages to spread the poop everywhere. He also seems to have an aversion to staying in the bathroom to poop, even while wearing a diaper – this probably coincides with independence being incomplete but he requires privacy to poop. The privacy thing is fun in public, as we often go places with lots of people and he really wants to be alone to take care of business.

So, pleased with the progress and hoping he makes some more soon!

Tristan and I took a shower before his bedtime tonight. Usually, when we do this, he’s ok with going to sleep with wet hair. For some reason tonight, he objected to the wet hair in bed so I decided to break out the hair dryer. To my astonishment, the hair dryer was the preferred option, and I took a few minutes to blow his hair dry. Six months ago, he freaked out when hand dryers in the bathroom came on, so I never expected this by any means.