Thanks for reading all of that! I do try to keep anxiety low and allow lots of downtime. We have just been hanging out all week. Unfortunately my sons favorite thing right now is his Perplexus maze globe thing. He would happily spend hours playing with it... and has. In fact I lost track of time one day 2 weeks ago when packing in a bedroom and ended up letting him play with it for 4 hours! The problem with the toy is my son has 0 frustration tolerance and every time the ball falls off he goes through about 5 minutes of hysterics. He cries and screams about how awful he is at it, throws it across the room, begs for help with step whatever next time, etc. Overall I just can't see it as relaxing!
He also likes to page through large books, like dictionaries. Sometimes he counts the pages, sometimes he makes up a story as he pages through, sometimes he is just quiet and content turning the pages for hours straight. I don't normally encourage this. Some days we both need it! He's allowed one movie a day, which is a favorite time for him. He can also substitute an hour on his tablet, but once again he just gets frustrated too easily to really enjoy himself much. Anything he gets wrong or fails at is the end of the world. He refuses to do things that he isn't already good at. It can take hours of fighting to get him to try something new. If he fails the first try, that's the end of it forever. I don't think I'll ever get this kid to play a sport.
Nothing is ever much fun with him. Tonight dad decided to play hide and seek with him. He has to hide starting at level 1 up through 10, so if you find him faster than he thinks you should for the level, huge fit. Crying about how he didn't pick a good spot and the game is ruined. Then he wants to start over at 1 because it's all messed up at that point. Not to mention the fact that he slipped out of the house during the game and I nearly ended up calling the cops when we couldn't find him anywhere and he didn't respond to our frantic calling. He was under a wheelbarrow that was resting over some old lumber behind our shed. We only found him because the neighbors dog was really interested in the area.
I honestly don't know if my son can relax. Nothing is ever right enough and he just always has a problem or complaint. Even at night he's always yelling stuff in his sleep and he isn't even still when sleeping. He kicks the walls all night long. If he gets into bed with me I can't sleep at all because he just seems to constantly move to get more comfortable.
His therapists agree with me that the reason he doesn't listen at all is because he is so distracted by internal thoughts. I've gotten to the point where I tell him to stop interrupting me when I am talking to him. He will say "I didn't say anything!" I tell him his thoughts interrupted me since he is listening to them instead of me! Hopefully he learns how to live in his body and can someday show his ability in school. Right now we are all so frustrated. He is a kid who can do pretty amazing math in his head for a 5 year old, it's probably pretty good for an 8 year old as well. Ask him to fill out a worksheet with 12 single digit addition questions and it takes hours. Quiz him out loud on division or geometry or high level math/science concepts and he runs around the room answering questions like they are nothing. How does that work in school?
