2010/03/21

Sunday, March 21, 2010 (#80)

Saturday Sunday Monday

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Sunday, March 21, 2010

Charles fetched Josh from The Home to go see grandpa David in The Mikado, along with B & Z, then took him back to the grandparents' house for Zander's 13th birthday. Sandy and I drove there for the birthday.

Almost as soon as we arrived, Josh put on his backpack and started looking like he wanted to go somewhere -- and a few minutes later, he went out the front door and got in our car.

Not wanting him to wander off or get unhappy, I thought I would try driving him back to The Home as long as he seemed ready to go somewhere.

When I got there, however, he refused to get out. (I rang the doorbell just to let them know that I had tried to bring him back, but he didn't seem to be ready for it.) So I drove him back to the grandparents', where he happily got back out of the car, came in, and seemed to be perfectly fine hanging out there. (The piles of cheese he managed to locate probably helped...

I have to wonder how that will affect his behavior when he gets back to The Home, or if it will be possible to distinguish the cheese's influence from the influence of simply being around other people who perhaps aren't monitoring him as closely as they do -- or perhaps just being around us, and being reminded of the habits he usually has when he is with us.

22:30

We were in bed, lights out, starting to drift off, when I started hearing odd noises from downstairs. Benjamin had been up late getting water, so at first I thought maybe it was him again... but the patterns weren't right.

I remembered that we had been interrupted when we were doing the evening lock-up (which is mainly just the front door, when Josh isn't here) and might have forgotten to lock the front door. At that point I sort of sat up in bed a little, listening for any further clues -- thinking that it might be, perhaps, rather inept burglars, the boys thumping in their room (and me misinterpreting it as coming from downstairs), or the cats jumping on things (Pip can sound like a person when he lands on the floor from any height).

Then I heard a toilet seat being dropped down. It's possible one of the cats might have been drinking from the toilet and accidentally knocked the lid down, but they hadn't been known to do that lately (Pip generally prefers to drink from the leaky bathtub faucet, and Kestra doesn't do toilets)... so... Benjamin again? This isn't making sense. One more noise and I'm going to go check it out...

There was one more noise, a fairly loud thump like a door being closed (if I remember right), so I got up, grabbed a flashlight, and went to check things out -- "just in case", I was thinking. I thought I was being paranoid and unnecessarily cautious.

But no, there in the breezeway was Josh, just getting undressed.

Long story short: Charles had apparently dropped him off here as a last resort because he wouldn't get out of the car when C went to take J back to the Home. He left a message on our answering machine, but didn't say whether the folks at the Home had been informed. I left them a voicemail just in case.

We figured this all out (Sandy came down after I ran upstairs to grab my keys -- unnecessary, if I had been thinking clearly, since all the necessary keys were still in their locks) only after some frantic running around to lock things up again before Josh trashed anything.

He had already gotten hold of all the leftover Halloween candy and was carrying it around.

We had just enough orange juice left for one glass (heavily diluted with water), and some leftover chicken I was going to take to the Home this week. I got him a bottle of Sprite from the basement, after he finished that glass; there's nothing else he will drink here besides OJ and Sprite.

Several almost-settling-down back-to-bed episodes then ensued, as we kept thinking of more things to check (he started watching TV -- I was at first inclined to let him do it, but since it was a school night we decided we had better be firm about turning everything off; I snagged the candy and put it back in the laundry room; reheated some chicken for him and hid the rest in the basement fridge, to avoid any late-night microwave incidents), and it was past 11 by the time we started to settle back to sleep again -- with Josh still puttering around downstairs.

At least he was in a good mood -- skipping, singing a little, looking relaxed. Can't decide if the cheese contributed to him not wanting to go back (i.e. making his behavior more oppositional) or maybe helped put him in a good mood; someone needs to study his food reactions in a controlled environment so we can find out once and for all if it is actually bad for him.