My kingdom for a screw-on cap.

Anthony's obsession with ripping things has extended to flip-top caps of toiletries for quite some time now. That of itself would be tolerable except that the edges left over are sharp enough to inflict a good scratch if considerable care isn't taken in the handling of them. Clipping off the edges only makes a different sharp edge, and I'm not going to the trouble of trying to file them down *each and every time* he does this. Burning the edges is another option, but the results are inexact and, hey, I'm literally playing with fire.

For shampoos, conditioners, and body soaps, we have resorted to re-filling pump bottles of more expensive (read: my wife's) products with the suitably inexpensive ones Anthony and I use. It should be noted that he doesn't discriminate; even some of my wife's products have flip-top caps, and he's quite happy to go after those as well.

Some products such as face washes don't work well with pumps, however, and for those it's a matter of finding ones that are both worth using and also come with a screw-on cap. I have happily used one that meets those conditions from a dollar store a number of times, but it is difficult to find except at a particular location, and now it appears it might have fallen victim to discontinuation altogether. I'm actually rather stressed about this; the following example illustrates the problem.

I am taking a few days off currently. Last night, Anthony was edgy but we determined it was a bathroom issue. He didn't go after sitting on the toilet for a while, but seemed all right, so we had him go to bed as usual. When I went to get him out of bed this morning to get ready for school, though, I found that he had vomited on his bedding, including his pillow, and had slept in that so that the side of his head was covered in vomit. (As an aside, although this is the first such instance in his lifetime, obviously we don't want him to go through that even once. My wife and I are trying to think of what will work for him and for us to ensure we can minimize any future time spent in similar situations). I cleaned him up and put him in a warm bath, hoping that would help him to feel better if he was still feeling sick.

I went about some other tasks and came back about 15 minutes later to completely wash and dry him, then had him sit on the toilet because he had given me reason to feel that might still be an area of concern. I took all of his bedding outside to wash off the dried vomit, then put what I could of it in the clothes washer. But when I returned to check on Anthony, he was holding the ripped cap of a new face wash, which I had ensured he would not see me hide behind my wife's shampoo and conditioner in the shower. That meant that, despite my efforts to attend to his needs and give him comfort, I either misunderstood how he felt, or his obsession was so strong that it took priority over how he was feeling.

In the end, I will probably have to bite the bullet and pay more for better bottles or containers. Maybe I will start a Go Fund Me account....

"Yeah, but what about Anthony?"

My wife has been working for an airline for several months now.  In so doing, members of our family can fly on her company's flights for free domestically (when they aren't full with paying customers), and at discounted rates on other carriers internationally.  My wife has already utilized this perk to travel overseas for a long-overdue visit with her family, and with our daughter to see a play in New York.  Shortly, she will travel to Boston with our younger son to bring some American history to life, and in the summer he and I will fly to Los Angeles to see Manchester City--his favorite soccer club--play Real Madrid.

But there is a common denominator in all of that: we aren't traveling as a family.  My wife has also talked about going back again to see her family and a lifelong friend, traveling to Sweden to see a friend there, and flying to France to fulfill a dream to go for a milestone birthday or anniversary.  The rest of us would also love to go to these places, and I would particularly like to go with just my wife to France since she spent a few months there before we were married and has spoken ever since about going back with me. But the discussion always comes back to, "Yeah, but what about Anthony?"

The longer a flight, the less likely it is that he will make it through without incident.  Even a trip to the West Coast for us is the same amount of time as sitting through a movie, and we don't try that.  Of course, that's a different environment; he can certainly make *some* noise on an airplane without incident.  But at issue is the inability to take him somewhere else if he gets upset.

That doesn't happen as often as it once did, but we need only look at yesterday's soccer game for our younger son as an example of the risk; we left Anthony at home with his sister rather than having him out in anticipated rain, but she contacted us almost immediately to say he was upset.  We asked her to close the laptops on the table so Anthony wouldn't target them, but she felt that if she even got up to try to do that, he would attack her.   She did eventually get him to go to his room without injury to herself, but his behavior was suspect until we were able to return a couple of hours later.

This general theme of accounting for Anthony has us thinking about how we will take care of him as we get older as well.  We want him to be able to stay with us, but we recognize that the difficulty of handling him on a day-to-day basis will increase over time; already, we are looking at how we will be affected when he ages out of the school system at the beginning of next year.  To that end, we are looking at something along the lines of a house with a mother-in-law apartment; to be more specific for our case, ideally we would have his room be part of our house but with the ability to lock it off from the rest of it, while opening up to his own extended living area where he could be attended to by a service provider when we are either temporarily or no longer able to handle him, including for times when it might be important for the rest of us to travel together.

But in order to do that, we would first have to sell our current house, and, in no small part due to the damage he has caused to it, we have considerable work to do before that even becomes feasible.