Anthony's teacher found that she could keep him somewhat occupied by listening to music on a portable player, but only with the older style of headphones that fit up against the ears rather than in them. We will gladly take any suggestion that helps to manage him, so we bought him his own inexpensive MP3 player. We have loaded onto it a variety of songs, not knowing what he might like. I am guessing that he simply enjoys the sound in his ears. Nevertheless, it seems odd to see a low-functioning autistic boy listening to David Bowie's "Blue Jean".

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We received a new hair clipper set for Christmas, one with a vacuum feature that makes for easy disposal of the clippings. Today's attempt at cutting Anthony's hair was far more successful than my previous one, although I suspect my wife will succumb shortly to the urge to use scissors to trim the uneven spots.

Anthony is now consistently pulling every sheet and cover off his bed, sleeping nightly on a bare mattress with the bedding in a heap next to him. I have reverted to tucking in his top sheet and instead removed the plastic protective sheet, hoping that was the source of irritation. I am also waiting to put him to bed to allow his twice-daily medication, which supposedly has a calming effect, to take effect. Nothing works yet.

I dress him warmly enough to do without covers, I suppose, if he insists on that. I nevertheless find it unsettling to see him sleeping on an uncovered mattress. Additionally, I am guessing he must be at least a little cold, because I still hear him making noise when he should otherwise have gone to sleep.

A final concern I have regards the mattress itself. I suspect sleeping without covers damages the mattress to an extent, yet I don't know how long I will continue to put sheets back on each night if the effort is in vain.

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My wife makes various goodies to take to friends at this time of year. Anthony has become her nemesis in this regard (as though he weren't already). If we are not vigilant in keeping him out of our small kitchen, he mashes cookies under plastic wrap. Or he eats entire plates of them. Or, as is the case with iced sugar cookies, he scrapes off the tops to render them worthless as gifts. Even with us in or around the kitchen, Anthony looks to commit these atrocities with the single-minded obsessiveness he shows in other pursuits. As I write this, I have been forced to drag him away from the kitchen to our basement family room to try to keep him out of trouble.

I have mentioned Anthony's tendency to pull the covers off his bed, either before going to sleep or when he wakes up. He has begun to do that every night lately, so I thought that perhaps I could save myself some trouble by not tucking the sheet in or replacing the blankets. That seemed to work well enough the first night, but apparently he feels the need to pull something off. Yesterday I found both the bottom sheet and the plastic protective--against accidents--sheet underneath pulled off the bed. Both are of a fitted design, and the latter apparently didn't come up as easily as he hoped. We now have a plastic sheet that hugs only three of the four corners of the mattress.

Our two children other than Anthony had a second round of mandatory school testing today. My wife had taken Anthony with her the first time during the week when I wasn't available to watch him. As anticipated, that didn't turn out very well. Today's tests were to take a significant portion of the day, and I wanted to see if I could get more sleep, so I took my chances at home with Anthony.

I put him in his bedroom, broke up some puzzle pieces, and took apart the LEGO's he had painstakingly stacked together by color. Then I closed his door and went to lie down, hoping he would somehow be sufficiently occupied to stay in his room for an hour or so.

I was indeed able to rest for that long, but I did hear sounds that I couldn't quite identify coming from Anthony's room. I decided that the potential risk of whatever it was he might be doing would be worth the undisturbed time.

When I got up, I found that he had pulled out a box of videotapes rendered obsolete by the DVD format and had taken them all out, examining each one. Perhaps because I am used to Anthony regularly creating extra work for us, I felt relief when I learned that putting them all back was the extent of the price to be paid for the snooze.

More interestingly to me, though, was being reminded of Anthony as a toddler. Before we knew that he was autistic, he would sit on the floor, oblivious to us watching him, taking CD's out of a rotating rack. He would look at the front, look at the back, and place each on the floor. It is one of my favorite memories about him, probably because, as a baby, Anthony was as cute as any we have seen. I am of course certain that I have no bias in asserting that.

This is probably low on the list of items worth mentioning, but it is still a little out of the ordinary. Anthony broke a chair at the dinner table this evening. It wasn't the sturdiest chair to begin with, part of a set we had bought at a thrift store. He had worn it down over time through his periodic tantrums and sitting on it at odd angles. We noticed recently that it the support structure seemed to be failing, so I wasn't surprised when it gave way tonight even though his behavior was nothing unusual--well, not unusual for him.

My wife bought a shrink-wrapped box of chocolates yesterday as a Christmas gift to send to her grandmother overseas. She put it on the counter, out of the way, intending to prepare it later for mailing. She was then busy doing something else when she heard noises that alerted her to potential trouble.

Anthony must have been hungry. The top tier of chocolates--fourteen pieces--was gone, and he had polished off two from the bottom as well. He did not display any ill effects that a normal person might after that kind of consumption, but he did become unusually violent later. It is difficult to determine if the overdose of sugar contributed to that, but it may be worth looking into. A friend with an autistic child tells us that her son is considerably better-behaved recently, without medication, after eliminating sugar from his diet.

Anthony has broken a couple of items in the house this week. First was the toilet seat or, more accurately, the hinge between the seat and the lid. The toilet seat itself can still be used--carefully--until we get another. The second casualty was a wall clock in the living room today. My wife did not see it happen, but heard the clock crashing to the floor. I imagine that we will find a cheap replacement easily enough. Honorable mention goes to a screen on one of the doors entering our house. He knocked it out before he came inside. I'm guessing we are lucky to not have raised the accompanying sliding glass pane into its normal position.

I intended to write about another relevant topic today, but have decided instead to write about my inability to sleep well, which is due at least in part to issues with Anthony. I have chosen to write it while I am far from an ideal state of rest, realizing that my writing may not be to whatever standard it might ordinarily be, but hopefully capturing the surreal nature that is lost when one reverts to a "normal" state.

I believe I can relate to a person who has been a victim of sleep-deprivation torture. I am not attempting to be facetious, and I do not mean to devalue the experiences of those who have actually suffered this as prisoners of war. I also otherwise clearly go about much of my existence with pleasant experiences and positive relationships with my wife and children--even Anthony, to an extent--that would not be associated with incarceration. However, I think I do deal with some of the same causes, if unintentional, and also some of the same effects.

I have not slept well for years. I don't know if I have gotten into that pattern directly because of Anthony, but it did begin at the same time that he started not sleeping for extended periods at night as a small child. I have had high blood pressure for years. I am overweight, although I am attempting to eat more healthily and exercise here and there, and am having some success trimming down. But, of more immediate concern to me (and probably related to the chronic issues) is that I feel like my health is deteriorating. I became sick a couple of months ago and, although the "sickness" is nominally gone, I have not returned to what had become an accepted level of health for me. That is worrisome, because even the previous level was characterized by being tired all the time.

I have been taking the sleeping medication Ambien, or a generic of it. But I still do not sleep a full night. I am going to try the "controlled release" version of it, even if insurance doesn't happen to cover much of the cost.

Yesterday morning, I had returned to sleep after about two hours awake in the middle of the night, and was sleeping deeply when Anthony woke me up. I am guessing that we did not feed him enough the previous night. Unfortunately for me (and my wife, who also was sleeping soundly), Anthony often is the most animated when he wakes up and needs to go to the bathroom or is hungry. Of course, telling him to go the bathroom does not get him to quiet down, and he will not go and feed himself, so attempts to lie in bed and wait him out do not work; eventually he wins and the deep sleep cycle is history.

I was trying to rest this afternoon as well. I had closed the bedroom door, abandoning family interactions for what I supposed would necessarily be a few hours. Just as I was sleeping soundly, again, Anthony began bothering my younger son's action figures. Naturally, my younger son wanted Anthony to stop. That upset him, and his loud reaction jolted me out of the sleep cycle.

My brain continues to be hazy, but I will not be able to go back to sleep for a while and, by that time, it will be late enough in the evening that I run into preparations for bedtime for everyone. I will have to try to ensure that all of us go to bed as quickly as is reasonably possible.

The most immediate of the immediate concerns--written that way intentionally--is that I have on occasion experienced pain in my head that I would describe as shooting from the center toward the top left side. It can be an intense, heartbeat-correlated pain. I don't know what a stroke is like, and I have not done any research to this point, but I am guessing that it would be a more severe version of what I sometimes feel. I can often tell that I am approaching the possibility for that to happen--not a stroke, but what I already experience--when I am not getting to sleep as quickly as I would like. Clearly, I need to alter my approach to getting sufficient rest, and that includes accounting for the "X-factor" that is Anthony.

We have a bottle of a red liquid in our shower. It might be shampoo, and we are using it as such. However, the bottle size matches that of many body washes we buy, and the consistency of this liquid seems a little different from what we are used to with shampoo. We may never know which it is unless we go to a store and look for an identical item, because Anthony opened the cabinet and peeled off labels on several products. We do have another bottle there that we are certain is a different brand of body wash despite any writing.

A significant focus of the meeting with Anthony's school staff was how to prevent him from pulling labels and stickers off anything in sight. I readily understood why that would be a concern after seeing how items, drawers, and cabinets were marked there. Anthony has been taking a medication prescribed to lower his level of obsessiveness, but it clearly either does not work or has yet to produce the intended effect. Anthony's teacher has created a small board with stickers for the express purpose of re-directing his energies. This nevertheless appears to be meeting with only limited success.

This fetish may sound like just a minor nuisance. However, we have other items around the house that are essentially useless because of Anthony. The ice/water dispenser on our refrigerator has a black panel with six red lights, for example, but what are they for? The remote controls for both an oscillating fan and our daughter's boom box (a birthday present) similarly have no markings, and we no longer have any idea how far to turn the dial to produce the desired temperature on our griddle.

Beyond his existing victims, what if Anthony starts to target cleaning solutions? What if our medicine cabinet, with some prescriptions, comes to his attention? Unlike dealing with a small child, he does have enough awareness--and height--to discover objects of interest virtually anywhere in the house. We won't make the mistake of attempting to use them without labels, so we may potentially be left with a lot of worthless stock that requires additional expense to replace. It may also be difficult to convince a pharmacy of the legitimate need to replace a prescription before it should have been used. We might ultimately invest in a locking cabinet in which to hide these things if it comes to that.

We met with Anthony's teacher and other school staff last night. Based on experiences of my wife (with another school previously) and a friend who also has an autistic son, I was prepared for a potentially uncomfortable exchange. Thankfully, it was not that way at all. The school principal, who had come to our house as soon as she heard about Anthony breaking the school bus window, was there and very involved. The teacher was positive and clearly looking for ways to improve the situation for both Anthony and those who deal with him. At the least, ideas were generated that perhaps would not have been otherwise.

One concern I had that ultimately is probably not an issue was the lack of hand-washing before consumption of food. The teacher would not have sanitized his hands last night before giving him a treat if I had not mentioned it, and the conversation on food-based rewards deepened my suspicions. To top it off, she said that Anthony is good about washing his own hands after using the toilet. I cringed inside when I heard that. Anthony "washing" his hands consists of him putting his hands in the water, putting some soap on them, and patting them together a bit as the water is running on them. He does not understand the "why" of washing, so he does not perform the "how". Nevertheless, we are probably lucky in that regard: Anthony simply does not get sick very often, and it isn't as though he himself has qualms about eating anything, anywhere, off of any surface. Perhaps it is not feasible to sanitize the children's hands each time a treat is given. If so, we will continue to hope that Anthony's anomalous physiology keeps him free of serious illness.

I also took Anthony to the bathroom at the school before the meeting. After seeing the toilet, I can only ask myself what the designers of a school for special-needs children were thinking. The toilet was attached to the wall without support on the floor. I am of course certain that the support is secure for regular use. However, I cannot imagine that the school will never have other incidents of children breaking toilets away from the wall in the future.

Regarding bodily functions, I realize now that my wife and I may be taking for granted Anthony's ability to use the toilet. It is true that we make significant efforts to ensure that he does not wet himself or do worse, and yet he still does occasionally. Nevertheless, the school staff we spoke with said they do have other children there who are Anthony's age, yet are still in diapers.

***

After I came home from work tonight, we ate dinner quickly and left for my daughter's school presentation. Anthony did not last long in the auditorium, and I believe I know why: when we returned, he promptly went to the toilet and plugged it again. Because of the hurried nature of the evening, I was looking forward to relaxing just a little bit before dealing with something like that.

I knew I needed to give him a bath, so I turned on the water, checked the temperature, and had him get in while I began attending to the toilet. When I saw that the water was the right level, I turned it off and again checked the temperature. He had apparently decided that the knob turned some to the left was not in the correct position, and returned it to vertical so that the water was now decidedly cool rather than nicely heated. Unplugging the toilet had turned out to be more work than I anticipated, so now not only did I still have a plugged toilet, but I needed to immediately deal with Anthony in the bath so that he would not get too cold. As I write this about the time we would normally be getting kids to bed, the toilet still is not ready for use.