After another pre-bedtime psychological breakdown last night, we have decided to resort to a sleep aid: chloral hydrate. The plan is to use this short-term until we can re-establish bedtime. Give it to him before the breakdowns to make him sleepy so that he’ll sleep even before he has a chance to think about bedtime. Get him into a new pattern.

For the past five years, I’ve been gushing that we never have any sleep problems with E-Niner. He goes to bed at 7:30PM, wakes up at 7AM, and is an awesome sleeper. Rock solid. It was my one thing that I hung on — sure, the days are hard, but at least he’s a good sleeper!

Hopefully we can nip this in the bud (I see those words coming back to haunt me — EVERYBODY, knock on wood, right now!), and get him back in a regular sleeping pattern.

One woman I’ve been e-mailing with whose son has psychotic episodes said that they blow away the images he has in front of his face. It is like a ritual; whenever the images come, they just blow them away. It teaches the child that he’s in control. So we’ll try blowing the fish away this afternoon.

We’re also going to do an all-out fish exorcism tonight. We’re going to round up all the fish in our nets and flush them all down the “poop tunnel.”

E-Niner said he’s been seeing clown fish, star fish, angler fish, and then he named some other species of fish that I’d never heard of and then some sort of crustacean. Of course the child doesn’t just see regular old fish, of course he sees many different varieties and can name them all. I should ask him what kind of whale it was…

The past 48 hours have included such elements as a lazy old dog, a broken down car, an emergency call to the psychiatrist, a second round of IEP tests for E-Niner, and dinner with a dear friend — not necessarily in that order.

E-Niner has yet a new prescription medication. Clonidine. To be taken when he’s in a complete psychological breakdown, like what happened yesterday when he trashed our foyer.

He had IEP testing in the morning. (“He’s so smart!” said the examiners. I’m getting the idea he is smart.) When we got back to the car (illegally parked in front of our primarily low-income, neighborhood, soon-to-be shut-down Chicago Public School to make way for rich kids to have their own junior high), my tire light was on.

So I did what any driver who has gone to driving school five times in the past eight years (who? moi? oh, shut up. I drive. a lot!) would do — I drove myself to the trusty 50 cent air machine at our nearby gas station and pumped the tires with air.

Problem being that the 50 cent air machine usually has a tire pressure gauge on it. This is why I break out the quarters and actually pay for air. It’s kind of a nifty contraption. You can check tire pressure while you fill, so I’m always sure to keep my treads at a comforting 35 pounds.

As you can probably guess where I’m going with this, the tire pressure gauge was broken. So I winged it. I worked on one side of the car and then I stopped. Too snowy, dirty, icky, gross. Plus, I have a 50 percent shot that I licked the issue.

Fate would have it that I picked the wrong tires to fill. So instead of going back out in the cold, yucky wet, I drove to our local car repair shop.

The guy there checked my tires and said that my front left had over 40 pounds of air in it! (Hey, when I fill, I fill.) So he let air out of that, and put air in the ones that needed it. Nice. Hunky, dory. Right?

Wrong-o. Because then the car wouldn’t start. It just sort of clicked around and wouldn’t vroom. Luckily, I was at a car repair shop. They jumped it, checked the engine, and determined that my alternator was shot.

Remember? E-Niner is in the car with me. Key point.

So I determine that since the garage is only five blocks from home, I’d leave the car with them and walk back.

As E-Niner and I waited in the smokey office, last touched with any type of cleaning product circa 1952 and still smelling heavy with nicotine and gasoline fumes, we spied a very old, very tired Golden Retriever. He was balled-up next to the cinder block wall underneath a staircase, laying on a plaid dog bed, behind a gate. I felt bad for him, wondering if all these years he’s just sat under those stairs inhaling the noxious fumes.

Anyway, E-Niner (dog phobic) spied the pooch and proceeded to get anxious about the situation. He kept imagining the dog jumping out from behind the gate to “get him.” I couldn’t get through my paperwork fast enough with the service guy.

I’m pretty sympathetic to E-Niner’s plight. I’m not that bad, but I’m scared of dogs until I get to know them. Then I’m only just jumpy.

Back to the story at hand and not my own personal psychological trauma, the change of plan (walking home) plus the anxiety about the dog was enough to set E-Niner off. And when I say off, I mean ballistic.

We walked out of the gas station, and no more than five feet off the premises, the kid drops one of his toys in the snow. Toy has snow all over it. E-Niner doesn’t have gloves on. His hands are cold. I wipe off the snow, put on his gloves. E-Niner can’t now feel the toy in his hand…let the games begin!

As we walk home, he yells at the top of his lungs that he hates his gloves. He keeps dropping his toy — on accident or on purpose? I can’t tell. “I hate my gloves! I want to go home! I keep dropping my toy! AGGGGGHGHGHGHG!” Like that. For the first two and a half blocks.

At exactly the mid-point, he chucks one of his toys into a fresh snow bank so that it sinks quickly to the bottom of about three feet of snow. We can’t find the toy. If he hadn’t lost it before, he loses it now. For good. I’m kicking snow around trying to find his toy. He’s hitting me on the arm, hanging on me, telling me to stop burying his toy more.

I wonder to myself if it is worth it even trying to find it or if we should just move on. Finally. Finally! I find it. I think this is good. We have what he wants. We can walk home now.

So we start off. He stays back a few steps, and charges at me from behind, pushing me like I’m one of those big pads football players push down a field at practice. He does it again and again and again.

I don’t know where to turn. Ahead of me is a set of busy commuter train tracks. To my right is a busy street. Behind me is a child that has lost it. I can’t stop and give him a time out. First, he probably was in no shape to comply, second it was cold, and third I would much rather be dealing with this in the safety of my own home.

So I plodded on ahead, either bracing myself for a 50 pound bump every few steps or grabbing him when I thought it was appropriate.

At home — finally, finally! — is when he trashed the foyer. He came straight inside the house and started flinging boots and bags everywhere. I couldn’t stop him and wasn’t always fast enough to catch him. He slammed a clay vase full of dried eucalyptus leaves against our glass door, thankfully breaking the vase and not the door. There were plant leaves everywhere!

I tried doing the therapeutic hold I was taught — wrapping his arms around his torso — like a human-held straight jacket. The kid is too strong for me, though. He kept slamming me against a wall.

I let him go, and he lunged at me — swinging, hitting, screaming. I pinned him to the ground, pleading with him to stop destroying our house and hurting me. He would cry uncle, I would let him go, and the cycle would start again.

Thankfully, our babysitter was there with T783. I love our babysitter. She’s prompt, responsible and also in a combined Masters/Ph.D. program in psychology. I love her, but she loves us too. We’re her reliable term paper for every class.

She tried to talk E-Niner down, and it was working. But he still just couldn’t keep it together to comply with her request of putting what remained of the vase back on the table. While she was with him, I called Joe who rushed home from work and the psychiatrist, who called me back within moments.

I went back downstairs and hauled 50 pounds of fighting boy up three flights of townhome stairs to his bedroom and told him to stay there until Joe got home. I shut the door, only to hear the two hard things in his room — a baby monitor and sound machine — get whipped against his bedroom walls.

Joe only works ten minutes away, so he was there pretty quickly. Our babysitter’s stint for the day was done; she left for class. And within that same moment the psychiatrist called me back. Over the phone, he prescribed Clonidine. He said we are to give it to E-Niner when he’s in an all-out unreachable rage, as he was today. Clonidine and a mini-dose of Seroquel (the anti-psychotic sedative that E-Niner already takes four times a day).

So. When that was all done — only 11:30 AM, with eight more hours before E-Niner’s bedtime — I was beat and beat-up. My sister came over to support me and help. I can’t tell you how blessed I am to have such a wonderful, caring sister. I don’t know what I would do without her.

The rest of the day, I nursed an extraordinary migraine, which is why, when my good friend e-mailed about a spur-of-the-moment dinner, I accepted.

My friend is also raising a child with special needs, so she and I have that bond.

After telling her about the day that kicked my ass to Jupiter and back, and listening to the details of her child’s meltdowns for the week, we made a decision. Truth be told, she came up with the idea.

She said, “Let’s pick one thing we’re going to do this week for ourselves. One thing. We have to say it to each other, and then we have to do it. You first.”

Do you know how hard it was for me to come up with something? I floundered. Flappy floundering. But we both managed to set a goal. I ended the day on a positive, so that was nice.

Want to see how positive? Here’s the picture she took when we left:

endswith8741 ends on a positive