The WILD thing

Let me just start this out with a little summarizing. My child has been WILD for several days now. I know moms of little boys and mom of kiddos with Autism will understand, but wow. For the past four days, Nick has been being absolutely as destructive as possible. I feel like the only words coming out of my mouth lately are, "Nick, no, Nick stop, Nick, you're gonna hurt yourself, Nick, stop tormenting your brother, Nick, it's not o.k. to put the dog in a headlock" etc etc etc. Anyway, you get the picture, right? I knew it was especially bad when I told him to stop doing wrestling moves on the poor dog. Yes....I'm serious. So, what does he do as soon as he stops messing with the dog? I know, it's hard to believe, but he climbs on top of his dresser and counts, "ONE, TWO, THREE.....JUMP!!!!" Nick proceeds to take a flying leap off the top of the dresser onto his bed. What can I say? I give up the fight and get some chuckles out of watching him do this several more times.

Nick has also re-discovered his love of tearing up paper. The other day, I left him at the kitchen table with a bowl of strawberries and a cup of rice milk. He was watching a cartoon and Max came with me while I went to the bedroom to take a shower. I must know Nick a little better than I give myself credit for, because I went to check on him right after getting out of the shower. He had managed to spill the whole cup of milk on the kitchen table. I caught him alternately dipping the strawberries in the milk and attempting to clean the milk up....with our bills. I had to throw away several bills that were literally falling apart because they were so wet, but thankfully managed to save our new insurance card so I could take it to register the new minivan. I cleaned up the milk and retired to the bedroom to dry my hair and get dressed. Again, I checked on Nick as soon as I was all dressed and dry. Imagine my surprise when Nick ran up to me as soon as I came near the kitchen!! This is a common technique by Nick to distract me from whatever mess he has managed to make. So, I immediately get past him and find that he has found the insurance card for the minivan and ripped it to shreds! So much for managing to salvage that! Then I find that Nick has managed to locate (and open)some dog treats. I guess he wanted to see if they could float, because I locate said dog treats in Ollie's water bowl. Sigh....

Finally, yesterday was probably one of the wildest days of all. We had several errands to run after school and Nick was NOT happy about that. He screamed and threw a fight and we eventually had to carry him out to the car. He threw a fit at every single store we went to. This included K-Mart, Target and Sam's Club. He started off at K-Mart by running into the store and promptly throwing himself on the floor and screaming. I wrestled him into a shopping cart (again, not a fan) and fought him trying to stand up or get out of the cart for the entire shopping trip. This is pretty much the way it went at every store, but we had to get stuff done and Nick doesn't get to determine what we do, so we just powered through it! He has also been doing this new thing where he lets out super loud yells whenever he feels like it. He doesn't do it when he's upset or anything, just seems to do it randomly. So, we got lots of interesting looks and some stares while we were out and about. Sometimes I feel like yelling at people that he's not trying to be bad and that he has Autism, so they can just stop staring already!! I've managed to keep my mouth shut so far :) Maybe next time I'll just say, "Go ahead and stare, he has Autism, so he's not paying attention to you anyway!!" :)