ME, THE BOY, AND THE MONSTER

Christmas was never going to be easy, but this year has been the hardest yet. Tickle has been in therapy for a couple of months now. He’s doing really well; by which I mean he hasn’t run out of the room or hit the therapist. Yet. He seems to have understood what therapy is all about - sometimes when he’s having a manic moment at home he will say he wants to go and see our therapist to talk about his ‘wobbly feelings’, but he hasn’t yet got to the stage where he can actually do this during the sessions. We knew it would get worse before it gets better - but we knew that in the same way that we ‘knew’ it would be hard work adopting a child. It’s obvious, but you don’t really fully ‘get’ it until you’re in the thick of it. Tickle at the moment is probably as bad as he’s been in at least a year, if not more. Although, when I read that back, it’s not entirely fair, as in a lot of ways the progress he’s made is still apparent. He can play independently for most of the day now, whereas ...

Tickle's Monster has had a severe aversion to sleep for quite some months now. Tickle already has melatonin to get him off to sleep (for which we are eternally grateful) but keeping him asleep is quite a different matter. For most of the summer Tickle's internal alarm was set to 4.30am, and once he was up, he was up. Some days were better than others. Some days he would play in his room (relatively) quietly, or watch cartoons on my iPad. Other days he would stand by the side of our bed and scream. Or he'd hit us until we woke up and talked to him. Or he'd bang his head against our bedroom wall. This half term Tickle has had a meltdown of epic proportions. I'm not quite sure what triggered him; perhaps it was just the fact that he'd got settled back in to class with a really supportive teacher, and all of a sudden school was disappearing for a week. Perhaps the fact that he's just started therapy didn't help. Perhaps it was just the phase of the moon....