Sunday, April 1, 2012

Self-Injurious Behavior

Lately Michael has started to do this when he is in a meltdown. He'll usually start by slapping his leg (he's been slapping the floor/table/wall for months now) but now it is also escalating to biting his kneecap and his arm and hands. The other night he bit his arm so hard that he broke skin. So I decided to get a referral to Children's Hospital to get a full evaluation since the guy at Mary Bridge was kind of a jerk who blew off a lot of his behavioral issues. I'm also going to talk to the ST and OT about it on Wednesday and see if they have any ideas how to curb this. I don't know what I can do since I can't exactly have him voice his feelings. I could tell him all day "we go here and do this if we are mad" but I am 99.9% sure he wouldn't connect the two things and be able to actually utilize whatever I taught him. Sometimes this crap is hard.

Transitions and doors.

I've said in previous posts how Michael has issues with doors. I don't think people truly understand what I'm talking about so I decided to capture one instance on video. Each time varies slightly, obviously, but this is a pretty good idea of what we go through. He was completely fine until the transition of game to getting in the door to brush his teeth, which took an entire 12 minutes. If you want to skip to the end, you'll see how quickly he gets over it once his brain catches up with the transition. He goes from completely melting down, to perfectly fine in seconds. THIS is why when the stupid man at the pizza joint told me to go outside, that I basically told him to kick rocks.