Monday, December 22, 2008

Anthony defecated in the bathtub this evening. That is not particularly unusual, but I am upset with myself because I know better than to leave him in the tub any length of time. I haven't had to deal with this for a while, precisely because I generally attend to him right away. Tonight, however, I had a conversation with my wife that ended up longer than I anticipated due to distractions with our other two children. I even went to check on Anthony with the purpose of washing him shortly, and found his water was not as warm as it should have been because his siblings had opened the bathroom door. I added more hot water and returned to finish my conversation. In that short interval of having warmer water again, Anthony apparently found it too relaxing. I grabbed a plastic bag and transferred the offending matter to the toilet, discarded of that plastic bag, and then used a much larger bag to immerse my hand to pull the plug without the psychological hangup of dealing with contaminated water. Nevertheless, plastic bags do have sufficient porosity to leave a wet feeling, so I end up washing anyway each time this happens.

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Today, Anthony bit my wife (his mother). This time was worse than ever before. She has scars from previous bites, but today he bit her on the index finger and palm hard enough to break the skin. He was trying to bite her face when she put up her hand to block him, and he clamped down on it and would... not... let... go. My wife finally resorted to biting him in the neck to get him to release her hand. He himself looks like he has been in a battle zone after my wife tried various things to break free before biting him back.

This may end up being a turning point for us; we now see that we may not have a viable alternative to putting him in a group home if funds are available to do so. He understands that I am capable of hurting him if he attacks me, and he even understands that it is a bad idea to attack his mother if I am nearby, so he actually did look around to see if I was home before assaulting her today. This is not the first time that I have heard of him doing that, but, combined with the intensity of his bites, I am worried for the safety of my wife and our other children when I am not at home. To add to our problems, he opened yet another hole in a wall with his head. He intentionally tries to create holes, as opposed to simply banging his head for the sake of banging his head. He also took off the clothes my wife had him put on, and urinated on his bedroom floor. That was a first as well; he usually just creates a puddle with his clothes on after refusing to go to the toilet.