Anthony turned 18 recently and, as such, became a legal adult.  My wife and I had to go to court to get ourselves declared his legal guardians so that, for instance, a doctor can discuss Anthony's medical care with us. Isn't that silly--despite Anthony being clearly unable to speak or do anything on his own, a doctor could not legally tell us anything about him without us getting ourselves declared his guardians?  I understand the state must take a blanket approach to anyone of legal age, but it seems that it could be simplified for those who can readily be declared by a medical professional to be incapacitated.

The downside to having to go to court (besides having to use a vacation day from work) was that the process cost us several hundred dollars.  The upside, interestingly, is that Social Security will now pay his living expenses, so we can charge to have Anthony live with us!

Better late than never, I guess.  It's kind of sad to us; how we could have used funding from an early age for him.  It would have helped at least a little in our attempts to provide therapy for him when he was younger, and then later with all the damage he has done around the house as he has gotten older.  Speaking of which, normally that entails things like holes in walls and broken tables and counter tops, but occasionally it is something like rendering our daughter's disposable contact lenses useless when, as happened a couple of days ago, he was in one of his ripping/peeling moods.  It's too bad that insurance doesn't cover damage or loss due to autistic siblings.

Anthony is fat--or at least chubby, but certainly approaching "fat".  He doesn't exercise on his own, of course, and lately he lies down a lot on his bed and watches old Disney VHS tapes since he broke the DVD player in his room.  But I have an idea to slim him down: Each of the other four of us in the family will take turns getting him to copy an exercise he or she is doing.

Anthony copies much of what I do, and he also complies with others if told to do whatever it is that they are doing.  To test the exercise idea out, I had Anthony stand opposite me behind a couch. My wife briefly objected to me putting my hand on the couch for stability, correctly noting it would lessen the intensity, but I was actually doing it for Anthony, knowing that he would mimic me and he would not be able to do the exercise otherwise on his own. Then I told him to squat down as I was doing.  He clearly is not used to doing that, and, after five or six times of him huffing as he followed my lead, he refused to do any more.  He also got a little upset when, after he sat down, I tried to get him to raise his legs from his seated position.

Going forward, we will have to arrange times for him to join each of us in our exercise, whether it be out for a brisk walk, ascending and descending stairs in rapid order, or anything else we can think of to get him moving and breathing a bit harder.  We do have to be careful though: we have already tried in the past to get him to jump on our mini trampoline, and he gets upset fairly quickly over that.  We will have to push him, but not push so much that he flies off into a rage.

I have a plum tree that is finally producing fruit this year. The fruits are red, and as soon as they started changing colors, birds pecked at two of them, causing them to fall off. Since then, they have not touched them, despite the fruits staying on the tree a long time. I am guessing the birds thought they were cherries, and, being disappointed in the initially sour fruit, left them alone.

I also have grape vines that are popular with the birds; a couple of years ago I didn't pay them enough attention--there were only a few grape clusters then--and the birds stripped them completely clean before I knew what was happening.

That the birds have left the plums alone after an initial couple of bites while systematically pursuing the grapes leads me to believe communication between birds is sufficiently advanced to be able to identify specific ideas, such as "fruit/food", "that tree/over there", "sour", "don't eat". My daughter and I were discussing this, and we both also remember reading an article about the complexity of prairie dog language.  We wondered if humans might at some point be able to decode and duplicate animal sounds to be able to communicate with them.

But that would likely depend on the complexity of the animals' communication.  The reason this is of interest to me is that Anthony simply does not get many specifics of language.  Recently I told him to bring me his cup from the table so I could give him something to drink.  First he brought me his plate, which was the nearest item on the table.  I told him again to bring me his cup.  This time, he brought me his bowl, which was the next closest item on the table.  The third time of telling him to bring me his cup was the charm, but perhaps only because it was the last item left on the table.

I have the same issue if I try to tell him to turn on a specific switch for a light or a fan; if there is more than one choice, he clearly doesn't get it when I specify a particular one.  This leads to a fair amount of frustration for him, frankly, and sometimes makes him upset.

I wish I understood more about how language is learned.  Clearly, nearly all humans learn it from infancy, and their brains can match specific and complex concepts to electrical impulses--or something of that nature--to allow for high-level communication.  Is Anthony's brain no longer capable of being taught language? I have given up hoping for him to be able to communicate verbally, but there are those with autism who are non-verbal, who can nevertheless communicate via computer or with other means.  But so far those avenues are largely closed off to us.

We haven't had as many negative issues with Anthony lately compared to other periods.  I think part of that can be attributed to understanding better how to deal with him when he does show signs of aggression; for instance, we have learned when he wants to engage us, it is best to ignore him--including not looking at him, even as he tries to hurt us--and get him into his room as quickly as possible where he can create more holes in the walls if need be.  But I also wonder about the role puberty has played in his aggression, and think that as he gets older, perhaps some of that is subsiding naturally (I can always hope!).

However, some days are of course worse than others, and we wish we could tell what the underlying issues were to keep things on an even keel.  Today he went to our family room and took several DVD's out of the cases; that isn't terribly unusual, but it does seem to happen when he gets in certain moods.  He also helped himself to three bananas.  I am rather certain that it would have been more, except that we ran out of bananas.  Then later when we were at a family gathering at my parents' house, my sister was trying with little success to get her son to obey her, when Anthony got upset at that--he has a history of getting angry when anyone is being scolded, for some reason--and pushed the nearest chair into the table.  Unfortunately, his young cousin was sitting in the chair at the time, and he hurt her arms in so doing.  He wasn't intending to hurt her, but his action had that effect all the same.  I apologized to both my sister and my niece.  They both understand about Anthony, but they aren't used to being directly affected by him (and shouldn't have to be).  My wife and I agreed that we should probably have our younger son sit nearest Anthony in such circumstances so an unsuspecting child--who can't anticipate the situation--doesn't have to suffer because of him.  

I took the day off recently for our anniversary, and my wife asked me to see Anthony off to the bus while she briefly attended to a job-related matter before we went out together.  I had Anthony all ready to go: coat on, shoes on, harness for his bus seat on; and we waited for the bus.  I heard the bus come, opened the door and nudged Anthony outside with, "See you later Anthony!", knowing that is how my wife sends him out; he dutifully gets on the bus by himself.  But Anthony paused, looking at me. I told him to go ahead, and he stepped down another step, still looking at me.  "Oh, that's right," I thought.  My wife always gives him a kiss on the cheek.  So I did the same, and he went on his way. 

Anthony is, perhaps more than most, a creature of habit.  When my wife and I laughed about this incident later, our younger son (11 years old) reminded me that he had also resorted to kissing Anthony on his cheek when my wife once asked him to get Anthony out the door as well.  I felt a little strange kissing Anthony on the cheek; our younger son felt even stranger.  (I'm not sure that's grammatically correct, but I'll keep it that way.)

Sometimes we create our own problems with Anthony, and sometimes they are of his own doing.  I give Anthony a hug every time I put him to bed, so he expects that as well, and I don't dare break the routine.  But something as simple as expecting to take a shower in the evening when I am not ready (or too tired) to get in the shower with him, can have serious ramifications for us.  So, I do what I can to avoid presenting him with a situation that strays much from what he expects. 

Anthony's communication skills are extremely limited, but one thing he can do is give us an idea of what he wants to eat, if we give him choices.  For example, we show him several breakfast cereals, and he taps on the one he wants. Through this process, we have ascertained that he quite likes Reese's Puffs® cereal.  Recently we were out of that cereal, and Anthony was looking through the cupboard and tapped on one cereal only to realize it wasn't the Reese's Puffs, so he kept looking.  We ultimately had him eat the cereal he tapped, but he clearly wasn't terribly interested in it.

Being the good parents we would like to think we are, we dutifully bought Reese's Puffs for Anthony and looked forward to him enjoying them again.  At breakfast, we opened the cabinet door expecting Anthony to look through the cereal boxes.  It was behind others, so we cleared away the ones in front.  However, as we were doing that, he immediately reached for a bag of caramel chocolate popcorn that his grandmother bought for him as an Easter treat.  We laughed and tried to tell him that, no, popcorn is not for breakfast, while proffering him his heretofore favorite meal.  He pushed away the cereal box and continued tapping the popcorn.  As keeping Anthony from getting upset is a top priority for us, we determined that caramel chocolate popcorn would indeed be an acceptable breakfast for one day.  We then took steps to put it out of his sight.

We had a difficult couple of days this week.  On Thursday, my wife got a call from Anthony's bus driver saying he was having a meltdown on the bus and they did not want to try to let him off without one of us going out to meet him--they usually let him off the bus and wait for him to go into our house, after which we acknowledge his arrival by stepping out of the door to wave to the bus.  So my wife and daughter went out to meet him.  Upon being released from his seat, Anthony first slammed his head into the window and broke it.  He then stepped off the bus and promptly hit his head into my wife's and threw his backpack at her.  Fortunately, our daughter was able to get him away from my wife to prevent further injury to her.  She is now 15 years old and in a much better position to assist with Anthony than she was three years ago (she also enjoys pointing out that she is now a couple of inches taller than her mother!).

I had arrived home just before Anthony did, so I was inside when he came in to go to the bathroom.  He entered the bathroom and promptly bent down to hit the ceramic bathtub skirt (which was already fragmented from previous attempts), shattering several more pieces of it.  He then forcefully shoved the toilet seat up back against the toilet tank--I thought he might be able to break that as well--and glared at me as if to say, "What are you going to do about it, Dad?"

We saw that Anthony was wearing different underwear from that with which he had started the day, and found that his daily school note said he had wet himself shortly before it was time to go home.  We surmised that his rage was due to needing to have a bowel movement, and he did indeed do so once he was on the toilet.

Frankly, the above was not enough on its own to spur to me to write, but there was more to come.  The next day, my wife told me she needed to go pick Anthony up from school because he wasn't doing well again, so I needed to hurry away from work for us to all go together in our bigger vehicle to our younger son's scheduled futsal game.

At the arena, we had just been pleasantly surprised to see our son score the first goal for his team--he is much more known for his defense than his offense--when our daughter pointed out that Anthony had wet himself again.  I hustled him out of the arena to the bathroom and waited for my wife to find a nearby store with some replacement clothes.  As an aside, because Anthony simply doesn't wet himself outside anymore, we have not carried emergency replacement clothes with us for years, but we may change that now.

While I waited in the bathroom with Anthony, our daughter texted me that our younger son scored the second goal for his team as well, and we learned later a third attempt missed only by bouncing off the goalpost.  But neither my wife nor I got to see that, because we had to deal with Anthony. We were glad our daughter, who rarely goes with us, was indeed there so that at least one of us was able to see the whole game.  I write what was happening at the game not to highlight our other son, but to illustrate the effect Anthony had on the situation: We were there to enjoy watching one of our children's activities.  Because of Anthony, we missed more than half of what we were there for, and in this case we were especially disappointed because we missed some noteworthy action.

When we came home Anthony went into the bathroom again as he is accustomed to doing, and started taking off his clothes as he does a lot recently.  He looked at me because he knows I probably don't want him to do that, and I indeed told him to put his clothes back on.  That turned out to be a huge mistake; Anthony was upset from that point on.  I don't remember the order of events after that, but he overturned the table in his bedroom onto his bed, hit the bedroom door multiple times to pull away the hinges that I had just fixed yet again, broke the hard plastic container holding all his puzzle pieces, ripped off some drywall from a hole he had previously created, and broke one of the corner legs off our kitchen table.  Thankfully, the table manages to stand on three legs reasonably well. . . .

I realized after these two days the effect on the mood and health of others in the family as well--or at least mine; perhaps I shouldn't speak for others because we're all different.  But it's difficult to always have things broken around the house, and have them broken more quickly than I can possibly get around to fixing them. On top of that, never knowing when he is going to go off, and having to be prepared to deal with him physically, is tiring both physically and emotionally.  I'm hoping that we get a period of relative calm again for a while so we can go back to some semblance of normalcy in our lives.

After Anthony reaches a certain age, it appears we may be able to have the state pay for him to be in a home for those like him.  This would certainly free my wife and me to be able to do things we could not otherwise, and yet I find myself at times thinking that I would still want to try to take care of him as long as I am physically able; after all, he is my son and I do love him.  I don't like the prospect of him potentially being unhappy with his living arrangements, whether or not we can see that is the case.

Unfortunately, however, reality sometimes smacks me hard in the face (I know that isn't grammatically correct).  Today, that was almost a literal statement.  For some reason, Anthony wanted to engage me physically.  I refused to do it--that's how it usually works, for those of you who don't read this blog much.  Anthony responded by writhing on the floor; blowing out the contents of his nose at me; slamming his head into the door, then the cabinets; then trying to come after me again with hands, feet, and head; and on and on.  I was certain he was going to put his head through the door or cabinets, so I told him to target the edge of the sink counter instead, hoping that would get it out of his system and cause him some discomfort at the same time.  However, he stood up, and managed to hit the top of the counter with such force that he broke it completely through.  Then he went after the mirror.  Oh boy.  I managed to stop him before he broke that as well, and thankfully he seemed on the downside of his rage, so I had him go into his room where he continued ranting for a few minutes but calmed down without further incident.

I guess, if there is a positive to this, it will be that I don't feel much guilt over eventually letting go of him.  I know it is probably what we should do anyway, for a number of reasons.  But I think I will probably still see it as sad, if only for the same reasons that we feel sad about letting our other children go as well.

We used to live in Orange County, California, and went to Disneyland on several occasions while we lived there. Visits to Disneyland--and probably some other amusement parks as well--are the only times when having Anthony actually benefits us because we can ask for a disability pass and skirt most of the long lines. We did once have the attendant at the customer service desk ask specifically why our autistic son needed the pass, to which I replied that if he had to wait in line a long time, he would eventually get upset and start hitting and biting people. Any skepticism she might have had seemed to disappear quickly on hearing that.

We returned to California over the Christmas break for the first time in a few years, and of course Disneyland was on the itinerary. Sadly, we found that the disability pass for the most part did not afford us entry at a disability entrance (usually the exit) as it had in the past--perhaps they have been eliminated--but was usually treated the same as the "fast pass" that people can get to go at a later time but which of itself is not particularly fast on crowded days. But of course the waiting times of 20 minutes or so are still much better than an hour or more.

The ride Anthony--and the rest of us--enjoyed most, and about which we wish we had known beforehand, was the Radiator Springs Racers in California Adventure. The ride starts out as nothing special, cruising at slow speeds through the Radiator Springs landscape from the movie "Cars". I was beginning to wonder why the lines were so long for this ride when, after a few minutes, our "car" stopped by another and the "race" started. I don't know what kind of speeds this ride attained, but how I wish we could go on it again. We rode too late in the day and still wanted to do other things, then found out later that California Adventure closed an hour earlier than Disneyland, much to our chagrin. But in hindsight, both my wife and I think we should have paid the $20 for the picture they take of the riders toward the end of the ride. It showed Anthony with a big smile on his face to match those of the rest of us, and there isn't much that really elicits that kind of a response from him.