36-hour Turnbackaround

Sunny's behavior was fantastic yesterday. Then it fell apart when we went to read in bed. We were going to read five pages of a book he'd already started with Guy the other night. We'd already talked about what book he was going to read, how many pages he was going to read and so on. It would have represented about 5-10 minutes of reading.

Halfway through the first page he started saying he was too tired. I said, "OK, we'll go out and read in the hallway then. Or, if you want, you can read sitting up in my lap instead of lying down." It just escalated from there until he was running around, slamming doors, then lashed out at me. The fit didn't last very long, just five minutes or so, but it meant losing three stars within 15 minutes: Read Nicely, No Backtalking and No Fits.

We ended up reading the five pages out in the hall after he calmed down.

Guy and I have decided we're going to hold the line on reading in bed for the rest of the week. If it's still a nightmare, we're going to give up.

It's frustrating, especially because he's not a bad reader. He enjoys reading words all around him, on labels and signs. He even enjoys reading books, once he can get past the difficult starting stage. But he's gotten worse about his willingness to read books at home, and we're now at a low point at which he reads something on his own for maybe 15 minutes... a week. And this is with books he personally chooses and says he wants to read.

I am prepared to make a tactical retreat in this area. I don't want to keep fighting about something that makes us all miserable. We'll see how the rest of the week goes.

Probably as a result of the fit, he had a nightmare last night that the clothes in his closet were monsters. There was also a chainsaw involved. The nightmares were strong enough to wake him up around 3AM, and he yelled "goodnight" at us a couple times, which woke us up.

He shouts out in his sleep several times a week. Sometimes the sounds are really loud and disturbing... as my mother noticed during one of his sleepovers, they sound like screams of rage. Since he started the neurofeedback, he's been able to sleep through them, or put himself back to sleep afterwards.

This morning he was doing fairly well.