A one hour non-stop crying and screaming fest from 9 to 10 pm, followed by another hour of cycling through whimpering, tears, giggles, and more tears until about 11 when he finally fell asleep, exhausted. Poor guy.
And Ethan, of course, could not go to bed until Jake went down. He lay on the sofa, escaped - as much as he could in our small apartment - into his book.
Jake does not melt down often, is generally pretty damn happy. For a kid on the autism spectrum this is awesome, and I am grateful for it every day.
But when he does?
Oh, my.
He is the unhappiest boy on the planet.
It starts slowly. His eyes well up, his lip trembles. I can see it coming, but an seemingly powerless to stop it.
Sometimes it's a brief shower, a quick downpour, and then it moves on.
But, more likely than not, he just has to go all the way through the maelstrom until the happy boy I know can emerge out the other side.
I am alone with the kids this weekend - Dan is still in Seattle - and so don't have the time or energy to write out the full long story of this and still get enough sleep, but I can copy and paste in my tweets from Friday night, so you can see a bit of what I was up against (in 140 character snippets):
And then, of course, today, Jacob woke up asking "What happened to me last night?" and "What happened on Friday, Mom?" and wanted to TALK all day long about his crying and screaming AND about swinging at school, when I just wanted to forget it and move on. Sigh.
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