The Big Bad Wolf has a kindred spirit in Anthony. Both are equally adept at destroying building materials of less hardness than brick. For Anthony, though, there is none of this namby-pamby huffing and puffing. No sir, his weapons of choice are his head, elbow, and occasionally knee or foot.

Ironically for us, part of our problem is a desire to work more with Anthony. My wife was recently told by those working with Anthony at his school of his ability to communicate through pictures. This concept is by no means new to us; we have tried more than once to help Anthony in this way. But we thought we should try again, and also try to do more with him to help him to grow. My wife bought him more puzzles--he had torn up most he had--and some cheap earphones to listen to music, which he has unfortunately already broken. She is also trying to let him choose what to wear in the morning instead of grabbing something and giving it to him.

As a humorous aside, my first recent attempt involved our dinner of Mexican food with tortillas, rice, chicken, guacamole, chips, et cetera. We were nearing the end of the meal, and had Anthony choose on the sheet of pictures between "all done" and "more". He chose "more", so we gave him more chips since we were out of tortillas. After he was done with that, he still seemed interested in eating, so we showed him the sheet again and asked if he was "all done" or if he wanted "more". He surprised us by picking a picture that said "different". I didn't get it immediately, but my wife laughed and realized he wanted more food, but not the tortilla chips. That meant I had to give him some of my remaining dinner with tortillas on my plate. We jokingly said perhaps we needed to ensure certain choices were not on the list to prevent him from taking my food.

But many of our attempts to engage him aren't so benign. For instance, at any time I try to get him to wash his hands the way it needs to be done--wetting his hands, putting soap on them, rubbing them together before putting them back in the water--he is liable to go into a rage for up to twenty minutes. I keep wondering how many blows from his head the thin wood table in his room can take, and the same goes for countertops in the bathroom. The panel on the bathtub has already started to break and come away from the tub, and new holes in the drywall are produced in one shot instead of after multiple attempts. These episodes can easily happen two or three times a day.

At this point, we want to keep trying to work with him to do what we can to help him grow, just as we do for our other two children. But we may be forced to accept less than that if it means we continue to go on this way.