The Bottle is Banished!

Zack's made a lot of progress in overcoming his little drinking problem.  It hasn't been easy.  He's had a few setbacks, but he never fell completely off the wagon.

He's eaten a couple of quarts of applesauce, drank a few cups of bathwater, and discovered that if he dips his monkey toy under the running faucet he can lick the water off it.

Saturday and Sunday night, Mark sat with Zack for over an hour, prompting and encouraging and cajoling him into drinking from the sippy cup.  Over and over and over, Zack raised it to his lips and pretended to suck on it.  And after awhile, he wasn't pretending anymore.  He drank just a few tablespoons of juice out of the sippy cup and we were ecstatic.  I emailed his teacher and told him to work him today.

And today after school, Zack came home and picked up his sippy cup of milk, and with just a tiny bit of encouragement from me, drank the WHOLE DARN THING!

Then he ate some more applesauce.

A couple of hours later, he picked up a sippy cup of juice and again, drank it all.  Followed by another halfhearted request for applesauce.

The war is nearly over.  And we've won.  All of us.  Zack too.  Bottles will never be in this house again!  (Unless, you know, a friend with a baby visits.)

Banishing the Bottle - Progress!

He's clearly just humoring me here, and not really drinking, but at least he's not screaming and pushing it away.

I wish I had video of him when he lifts his shoulders to take a big, huge, dramatic, fake gulp, and then he smiles at me and rubs his tummy and says "yum."

The Battle of the Bottle, Part II

We've decided to get down to business, and crack down on our bottle habit.  We are 7 years old, and bottles should have no place in our lives.

Zack is not accepting it all that well.

AJ is having a lot of sympathy pains.  He keeps coming over to rub Zack's back.  Then he looks at me and says "good boy."  I'm forever being prompted by these boys.  I'm not sure who is raising whom, some days.

I've put away the bottles, which is good, because Mark can't break down and give one to him.  And bad, because I know where they are, if I'm the one who breaks down.  I know, I know, I should throw them away and get them completely out of the house so it's not even an option to break down.  It's a crutch, though.  I will be as strong as I can be, but I don't know what's going to happen.  I can't throw away the crutch.  Yet.

We will see how the next few days go.

Zack has been carrying on with the pink shirt, as usual.

Today at school a little girl in Zack's class was wearing a brightly colored shirt, with butterflies on it.  Apparently Zack followed her around like a little puppy at recess.  Kept trying to touch her shirt.  The teacher explained to the girl that Zack's sister had a shirt just like it,   She said it was very cute and the girl was a good sport about it.  I hope so.  I hope it wasn't creepy.  Here at home, or in our neighborhood, with people he knows well, it's cute.  I hope it didn't make the girl think he was weird.

AJ and one of the little neighbor boys had some bubbles as an appetizer before dinner tonight.

Sippy Cups Revisited

It's been quite awhile since I mentioned our sippy cup battle.  I know, and I'm sorry. We started it in late October of last year, and the saga continued into November as Zack stubbornly held out.  By Thanksgiving, we'd given in.  He had his bottles back.

I didn't want to have to write something all negative, like "well we've gotten nowhere fast, Zack wins every battle hands down because I can't take his screaming."

I didn't want to bring it up, until I had some real progress to report.

So, here's what happened.

One day last week, the boys' teacher called me and said that she thought Zack was thirsty at school, because he sticks his butterfly chewy under the faucet and then licks the water off of it.  So she wondered if I could send a sippy cup into school for him.

I thought quickly - well he doesn't actually drink from sippy cups yet, but there's no way I'm sending a bottle in to kindergarten with him - and reinforcing his bottle obsession.  So I told her, sure, I'll send in a sippy cup, you see if you can get him to drink from it.  Good luck with that.

And the very next day she emails and says casually "Zack drank about half the water out of the sippy cup today."

"Are you kidding?  He drank out of a sippy cup?  He drank WATER out of a SIPPY CUP?!"  I wrote back.

So we've kept a sippy cup at school now for the past few days.  Apparently since he has never, ever seen a bottle at school, he didn't even fight it.  He seems to accept that it's the sippy, or nothing at school.  She did say the second day he was less enthusiastic about it.  She had to reinforce (that is ABA therapist speak for "bribe") him with Cookie Crisp to get him to take a drink.  But, he's doing it.

So, we have created a plan to bring the sippy success into the house.  I'm going to have him drink from sippy cups every day at school, until it's just so normal for him, he doesn't even think twice about whether to accept it or not, when it's offered to him.  We'll start putting juice in it at school, the same juice we drink at home, so it's real tasty and familiar. 

Then one day, he'll get to bring his sippy cup home on the bus.  Maybe more than one day.  He can drink from it the whole way home.  And then he can bring it in the house.  And on that day....perhaps.....there just aren't any bottles in the house anymore.  So it will, in theory, be the smoothest transition possible.  If I have my way, he won't even realize a change took place.  We'll pave the sippy cup road from school to home as smoothly as possible so that it just slides in, seamlessly.

Now, if only they would both just start casually going potty at school......

How's that for Feel Good Friday material!

Nope. Nothing.

It's been 10 days now, and Zack has been a formidable opponent.  He has held his ground and so have we.  He has not once put his mouth on a sippy cup without a strong reinforcer (note the ABA-speak here, people.  I'm converted.).

Can't blame the kid.  He's been drinking from bottles since the day he was born.  Literally.  Actually he had a bottle shoved into his mouth within the first couple hours of life, due to a bit of low blood sugar.  I have a great picture of a nurse holding his bony little 5 lb. 8 oz. self, giving him his first bottle ever.  Unfortunately I can't find it, but I did find this cute one of Aliza giving a bottle to one of the boys, who for the sake of this story, we are going to assume is Zack.

On the other hand, Zack has become quite adept at handling a spoon -- a previously unperfected skill.  Well, I might be pushing it to say he's "quite adept."  He can spoon feed himself applesauce because he's decided it's watery and a good substitute when he's thirsty and sippy cups and regular cups are all he is ever offered.

Oh, this is about to get really really painful, though, because I know what the next step is.

We've been giving him one bottle in the morning, with his chocolate milk and his liquid multivitamin in it.  There are two reasons for this; one, I'm really anxious for him to take that multivitamin, since he has never in his life willingly and knowingly consumed a vegetable, and two, I wanted him to have that milk in his belly before he goes to school so he's not hungry/cranky for his teachers.  As we all know, hungry and cranky are hand-in-hand best friends so I like to keep them out of Zack's life, if possible.  He has enough troubles.

So what I'm going to have to do is eliminate that morning bottle.  That one last bottle he's been clinging to for dear life.  It's going to be loud.  The screaming, I mean.  His, I mean.  Mine will be all in my head.  Maybe I'll get the video recorder out so I can post it here and you can all share in the torture.

I don't know if we're going to make it.

Zack screamed and cried for a bottle for a little over an hour and a half last night.  He wailed, he was hysterical.  Mark and I took turns dealing with him and he did drink from a regular cup for a little bit, but he was out of his mind with anxiety.  Around 8:30, a full hour and a half after nighttime-medicine time, it dawns on me that I forgot to give him his Clonidine.  I just .... forgot somehow, at 7 when I gave the boys their other medications.  Zack had wanted lots of applesauce and I figured he was thirsty and applesauce is kind of watery.  And I was beginning to worry about the fact that he hadn't peed since the middle of the afternoon.  Only about 3 hours, but I was starting to think about that. 

Earlier in the day we'd been to the Harvest Party at Aliza's school and the boys didn't do well there.  Like an idiot, I marched them right into the classroom full of 2nd graders, and I tried to get them to sit in a corner with me, but within a few seconds Zack pinched someone, and I told him "no,", and he screamed, and it was one of those screams where everyone stopped what they were doing and looked over at us.....and later Aliza told me that embarrassed her, when Zack screamed like that in her classroom and I felt bad about that......and we were all so exhausted when we got home.  There was a lot going on all day, it was chaotic, and apparently I lost my mind.

I felt so bad when I realized I'd forgotten the Clonidine, the one thing that really calms him.  No wonder he was such a mess.  Within 20 minutes of having it, he relaxed and stopped wailing, finally, and went to bed.  Just about an hour later than usual for him.

But this morning he was up before 5:30, asking for a bottle, and I woke up with a jackhammer pounding in my head.  Way too little sleep for him last night.  I anticipate a rough day.  There's no school today, no therapy, he's with us all day with no breaks.  I'm not sure we're going to make it without bottles today.

All the Screaming

Zack's a tough guy.  He's not giving in easily.  AJ is worried about all the screaming.  He had his bottle of chocolate milk this morning and hasn't really drank anything the rest of the day.  He keeps picking up the sippy cups and saying "no?" and handing it over to one of us.  With his wide, tear-filled brown eyes.

{Pictured slightly smaller than usual and cropped to minimize view of cluttered kitchen.}

He tried to climb the dishwasher to reach the cabinet where he knows the bottles are kept.  When he had trouble keeping his footing on the edge of the dishwasher he put a hand on either side of it and tried his mightiest to yank it out from under the counter.  I worried for a few seconds he'd succeed; he is after all, the strongest 5-year-old alive (I proclaimed him that when I put a 40-pound sandbag in the toybox, along with 2 8-pound weights, to keep him from moving it, and he still maneuvered it across the room somehow.  That was back when he was 3, but I'm pretty sure the award would still stand.).  I started to take a picture of him trying to scale the countertop and he came over and screamed at me.

A little later Lily had the nerve to sit on the couch next to him.  He pulled her tail.  She swatted him right back.  He screamed as if he'd been mauled by a lion, rather than merely patted by a 5-pound declawed housecat.  He's a little sensitive right now.

Lily, by the way, has had her own problems this week.

She's better now.  She's mostly back to herself after her brawl with the neighbor cat.  I'll spare you the really gross picture of her oozing, gunky, leeching wound.  I won't spare you the adjectives, but I'll spare you the picture.  *smile*

Regressing: The Bottle Battle Continues

I'm ashamed to admit the new low we've sunk to.

Zack still won't take a sippy cup without being strongly reinforced.  And he was getting a lot of his calories from his chocolate milks apparently, because his discomfort and hunger is striking out where it hurts me most -- sleep.  Or lack thereof.  He is up half the night, not necessarily crabby, but wide awake and looking for things to do.  We gave him a couple of bottles at night, had a couple of very tired days, and decided enough is enough.

So what I've done the last 36 hours or so is give him bottles, and try to hide it from AJ, because he's doing so well with the sippys, I don't want AJ thinking he's got the short end of the stick here, but I also don't want him regressing when he's been doing so well.

What you can learn from this post is, if you ever need to torture me, deprive me of sleep.  I think those first two years with the boys not sleeping more than 2 hours in a row ruined me for nighttime activities forever.  I get tired at 8 PM, and it would take something pretty special to make me stay up past 10.  (i.e., New Years Eve is not special enough.)

We're Getting There

AJ is doing it!  He's drinking from a sippy cup!  I just have to decide if I dare give him his morning bottle in the sippy.  I don't know if I can handle the screaming and crying that early in the morning.  It might depend on how well we all get to sleep.  But, this was AJ's 2nd sippy of chocolate milk.  He sipped from it until it was gone!

Now that AJ has shown us he is completely capable of drinking from a sippy cup, I have a little less sympathy for Zack as he continues to fight it.

Zack is not happy about being served his milk in a sippy.  Not happy at all.  I'm surprised, I expected Zack to take the change in stride, and AJ to fight like a bear.  Just when you think you know your kids.....

Some Might Call it Failure; I'm Calling it Reassigning the Goal Date

At 1:30 I was awakened by the sound of a door slamming shut.  Subtlety, thy name is not AJ.

I got up and led him to our bed to try and get him to settle down, but he was very agitated.  Wringing his hands, tense, trembling a little bit.  I brought him downstairs and tried to sit down in the lazy-boy with him, but he had other intentions.  He went into the kitchen and he hesitated, and this is why perhaps my kids are slow to talk -- because they don't have to.  I knew exactly what he wanted.  I knew from the moment I heard that door slam.  But I waited for him to tell me.

He glanced at the refrigerator and I know he wanted to point at it, indicating he wanted juice or milk, but yesterday all day long, pointing at the fridge just got him a sippy cup, and that wasn't what he wanted.  So finally he looked at me and said "bot-l" more clearly than I've ever heard him say it.

I caved.

He drank two full bottles of milk, and then went right back to sleep.

So my new goal to be a 100% sippy cup house is next week Friday.

The Bottle Battle

We've been talking about breaking the boys' bottle habit for a couple of years now.  5 years old, and still on the bottle.  Not to mention in diapers.  But, one developmental problem at a time.

So every once in awhile we talk about the fact that we are just going to have to quit bottles cold turkey, and force the sippy cups on them.  I know they are physically able to drink from sippy cups; it's a sensory thing.  Zack can actually drink from a regular cup.  But the only way we can drink on-the-go is if they can manage sippy cups and/or straws.  Both would be nice, actually, but again -- one battle at a time.

I want to do this bottle battle before it gets warm out, and I have to worry that they are dehydrated.  It's rained the past few days and dehydration is about the last thing we worry about right now.  Seems like maybe a good time to give it a go, right?  I'm thinking Monday morning, we offer them sippy cups.

Okay is it totally backing out on the plan if I give them their morning milk in a bottle first, and THEN start the nothing-but-sippy cups routine?  Because the thing is, I put their vitamin supplement in their morning milk, and I really want them to take that.  Plus, if they don't have that morning drink, therapy is likely to go badly that morning.  Maybe that's what I'll do.  Wish us luck.