Pee

Monster potty trained over two years ago. He pee trained earlier than that, but he finally pooped on the potty after he turned four. It was a time of great celebration around here.
now, he only wears pullups at night. But those fail us all of the time. So many mornings he wakes up in a puddle of pee. And I don't know if it's because he drinks too much water at night or if it's because he sometimes gets his hands in his pullup in his sleep. A few times when he wakes up his pullups are pulled down.

Regardless, the potty training for the most part is done. I can deal with washing sheets, and the pullups are being paid for by Tefra, so he can wear them as long as he pleases. Someday he'll be washing his own sheets.

But now this child has started to pee himself almost every evening, sitting on our couch.

The first couple of times, we tried to be understanding, oh, it was an accident, it's okay..... but now it's been over a week of peeing on the couch every night, right before bed, and claiming he forgot that he didn't have a pullup on. It doesn't matter that the rule is, even if you have your pullup on (which we do our damnedest to not put on until right at bedtime but sometimes the jammies just go on earlier for whatever reason), you get off your butt and go into the bathroom.

My theory is he's doing this as some sort of revenge toward us. He's learning to deal with his anger diferently in his new dayschool, and I think he's working out other ways to "get back" at people for doing him injustices. We say something to him during the day that he doesn't like? He can be damned sure we'll be really upset when he pees on our still-pretty-new couches tonight and pretends it's an accident.

Of course my worrying mom mind then immediately jumps to, he's got a bladder infection. He's being sexually molested. He's being physically abused. This is his signal to us and we need to help him.

But the logical part of me puts the pieces together and sees a kid who is testing the waters to see just what exactly he can do to us to get back at us for, as he puts it, "Bossing him around."

We've been pushing him to be more independent lately. I have helped him get dressed all of this time and his OT has been telling us, he needs to do this for himself. And I've been ignoring her. But my son is turning into this little prince who thinks that he can clap his hands and have his clothes taken off him, put on him, food and drink placed in front of him and removed, etc, and I finally realized I was being had. Because the attitude is no longer, I love you Mommy and thank you for helping me, it's "I need water!" I can't put my shirt on!" "I'm too tired to brush my teeth!" And I finally thought, you're a spoiled little shit. And it's my fault. I've been waiting on this kid thinking he needed me and I've been deluding myself because he doesn't need me - not in the way I thought. He needs me to sometimes tell him, tough shit, do it yourself. He needs me to say, you pee on our couch again and you will be sitting on a wooden dining room chair to watch TV with us. He needs me to stop coddling him and start forcing him to do for himself or suffer the consequences.

Yeah, I know. I've been a sucker for so long. And then I put my foot down and hubby (who's been wanting me to do this for years) backs me up and suddenly we have a very pissed off kid on our hands who decides that peeing on our furniture is a neat way to get us for making him grow up.

If there's any consolation in this, someday when my son has decided to rebel against us in another, more clever and more evil way, we will get new couches out of the deal. If buying new furniture to replace slightly-pee-scented furniture is a consolation.

This kid has such an attitude that I swear I get scared sometimes of what he will be in the future. He told us tonight after he complained at us for bossing him (right after the pee thing, BTW), that we couldn't make him do anything he wanted to do and we couldn't stop him from seeing his friends down the street (this is a whole different story, but those kids are rotten in many ways which seems to make them VERY attractive to my son), that it WASN'T FAIR that we got to tell him what to do. And he's six.

Those creepy military schools where you send your kid away for two years and they come back completely changed don't seem quite so creepy at times like this.

Do they have those for first graders?