"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.