So we're 2 weeks into the summer holiday and I've been in total stress mode for the best part of it. I hear there are people that actually enjoy the summer break and relish in the time spent with their offspring but I'm definitely not one of them.
We currently have 5, 7 week old kittens and these present extra stress for me as they'll be here until mid September. On Sunday Lucas tried to kill one of them, really? you ask. I was in the garden with my husband and Freya and he'd come in the house, I assumed for the loo but after about 5 minutes I wondered why he hadn't come back. You have to watch Lucas 24/7 there are very few times that he is actually doing something normal like watching tv or playing appropriately with his toys, usually he's just stealing food or breaking something or drawing on my walls or furniture or smearing something somewhere etc, he has been overly "loving" the kittens since they were born and has trapped them, held them down, pulled them by their tails etc in an effort to just be with them. Anyway I wasn't expecting to come in the house to find one lying not breathing in the middle of the lounge floor with a string pulled tight around it's neck. Lucas jumped when he heard me coming and moved away from it, I was in total shock and panic and couldn't think what to do, I screamed for my husband while holding it. After a minute or maybe a few seconds I don't know I suddenly realised I needed to get the string off, it was totally limp so I thought it was dead but as I tried to pull it off it gave a tiny wiggle. I couldn't get it off and ran to get scissors and typically couldn't find any, my husband had appeared by now and tried to cut it off with a knife which didn't work as it was quite thick but by now I'd found the scissors and he cut it free. It immediately perked up but I was hysterical by this point. All I could think was my son is a murderer, I remember reading somewhere that serial killers start by abusing animals at a young age and here he was strangling a kitten that he claimed to love.
My husband thinks I'm insane, he thought maybe he was just trying to take it for a walk or something and hadn't meant to hurt it, he also claims he killed his first fish by keep taking it out of the water to look at it?!
I know children with autism struggle with empathy but I just don't believe that he didn't understand what he was doing, he's 4 and a half now he's not a baby and he knows right from wrong, if it was an accident why did he jump when I came in?
We had his appointment with the child development centre this week and the paediatrician confirmed my fears that this was not normal and needed further involvement from a psychiatrist, as he put it, not having empathy doesn't mean you go out of your way to hurt something.
Following on from that is both Freya and Lucas's obsession with trying to hold each others heads under the water every time they get in the paddling pool?! Again I feel they're both old enough to understand how dangerous this is and have had it explained to them a hundred times but still think it's a really good idea!
We've tried to get them out of the house as often as we can afford/handle but there has to be some time when we're just at home and this is when they're at their craziest. They were upstairs the other day and there was suddenly an almighty crash down the stairs, it sounded like a wall falling down but turned out to be lucas had decided to push a heavy wooden stool to the top of the stairs and let go?! Needless to say that was the end of the stool which broke into 3 pieces and made some lovely marks in my wall on the way down.
Even when we take them out it's like there's a timer on their good behaviour and usually by the time we get back in the car after a nice trip out they are back to behaving like 2 starved lions fighting over a piece of meat! I have never met kids that fight as much as mine do :(
I have 4 and a half more weeks of holiday to get through and every day seems like a mini victory but you know it all starts again tomorrow :/
No comments:
Post a Comment