What Safety Costs A Family Living With Severe Autism

We talk through what happens when severe autism elopement becomes so constant that we start padlocking gates and doors, then realize those same locks can trap us when seconds matter. I share the fear, the guilt, the dark humor, and the safety steps that finally make our days a little more survivable. 

• padlocking after repeated escapes 
• the moment he scales the fence and I cannot get out 
• how elopement forces impossible split-second choices 
• how our long-term work and caregiving plan collapses  
• desperation searches for safety tools and finding AngelSense GPS tracking 
• a woods search when he disappears 
• his running routes 
• the spiraling parent guilt story and the reminder that it is not you 
• first day of school stress and the constant baseline of aggression 
• a surprising improvement with arm biting and a rare proud moment 
• a full clear sentence during bedtime chaos 
• the workaround that makes walks calmer 
• noticing better focus and speech attempts with vitamin C and B complex 
• the local emergency box and special needs stickers for responders 
• building familiarity with poli

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Transcript

Welcome And A Hard Joke

SHANNON CHAMBERLIN 0:17

Hello and welcome to the Parenting Severe Autism Podcast. I am your host, Shannon Chamberlin. I'm so happy that you're here with me today.

SHANNON CHAMBERLIN 0:25

Hey Shannon, what's the biggest difference between your son when he was eight years old with severe autism and your son when he's twenty five years old with severe autism? It's the pee puddle in the bed is three times bigger. That's it. Everything else is pretty much the same. Thank you for being here. Happy spring. I hope you have found some resources for your kiddos, cause school's about ready to get out, and God help us all, right? Thank you again for your support and sharing of my episodes. And please remember, you can always buy me a coffee for as little as one dollar. You just click the little donation thing on your player. You can support the show that way. I really appreciate it.

Padlocks And The Fear Of Escapes

Fence Jumping And Getting Trapped

After Elopement Changes The Whole Plan

Desperate Searches Then AngelSense Appears

Tracking A Second Runaway Attempt

Cops In The Yard And Woods Search

First Day Of School Chaos

Arm Biting Improvement And A Full Sentence

The Sunglasses Hack For Peaceful Walks

Vitamin B Complex And New Words

Emergency Stickers And First Responder Trust

Contact Info And Closing Encouragement

SHANNON CHAMBERLIN 1:05

Shout out to Rachel W for buying me five coffees. Thank you so much. I think you're local to me. I hope to get to hang out with you sometime. Maybe we can talk about changing the entire world to help our kids with severe autism. Thanks again for your donation. I really appreciate it. And it was great to chat with you. In this episode, I've got quite a few cute stories. I'll probably share some of them and try to save some of them because you never know. He might not give me another cute one for a while. When I left off last time, he had just escaped and gone to our neighbor's house and destroyed their refrigerator and thought about destroying the inside of their house. That resulted in padlocking the gate for the backyard privacy fence. And then, you know, he just continued trying to escape and run the neighborhood and terrorize everybody. So we ended up having to put a padlock on the front door. And I I know that sounds terrible. It sounds completely unsafe. I still don't feel good about it. It's still there. We don't always lock it anymore because he's mostly tame now. But when he is really getting crazy, we'll go and lock that padlock on the front door. But yeah, it makes me really nervous because I mean, you know, what if there's an emergency and we have to get out? And it actually did cause a huge problem for me not too long after we had to install it in the first place. But it was because he kept trying to get out and go cause more trouble. Since the back gate was locked, he couldn't just open it and get out. So here we are, basically locked down in the house. We can hardly get out at all. And one day, I guess he got tired of the little things, the little escapes, and he actually ran away. If you're new to this lifestyle, we call it eloping. So he eloped and I couldn't catch him. That is in a separate episode from when I first started recording this, so I'm not going to relive that. It was one of the scariest things in my life. He scaled the privacy fence in two hops. And here I am in my stupid sandals because I still hadn't learned my lesson. All of this stuff had happened so quickly back to back. I know it's two weeks in between stories, but the summer, you know, we got here at the end of April, and then school starts in August. So this was between May and July. And it was just constant, just something new every day, constantly trying to control him, stop him from hurting himself, destroying the house, throwing his head into the light fixtures and the ceiling and the wall and the windows. And if it wasn't his head, then it was probably the Jurassic dig stuff, the little toys that we get him, where he can tap, tap, tap on the little eggs and uncover little dinosaur bones and stuff. Well, he started using those as rocks and throwing those at the windows. It was just every day, all day and all night was a nightmare. But before I realized that I really needed to have my running shoes on all the time, all of this happened just back to back to back, and he scaled that fence and ran away. So I'm barely awake, just sitting outside, enjoying the summer air, while he's chomping on my ear with his hate bullshit, and up and over he goes. The area where he was standing to hop the fence was completely full of our bicycles because he had that big trike with a basket on it, and then we had a couple of bicycles for me and my spouse, and that was where he was. I couldn't get over it fast enough to get to him and pull him off of the fence, and I didn't want to hurt him. Shortly, like immediately after I made that decision, I wish I would have decided the other way and just taken the risk to hurt him because by not wanting to hurt him by pulling him down and possibly throwing him onto the bicycles and you know, skinning his knee or something like that, his entire life was risked. So in hindsight, yes, I would have definitely risked my own safety and his to hop over that entire pile of bicycles and try to pull him off of that fence. It would be much better than the alternative, which was him almost getting hit by cars. I don't know what it is. There's something something in my brain. I just don't want to hurt people or animals. Like I I get along with all animals, but there was one dog in my life that some neighbors who I didn't like had, and it was almost like they trained their dog to hate me because all dogs love me. But that dog one day jumped over my fence where I lived and attacked me. And all I could do was jump up on an air conditioning unit and try to like keep a stick between me and the dog. And my boyfriend at the time hopped the fence because he saw what was going on and he came over and kicked the dog, and I felt bad for the dog. See, I'm just like that. But I mean, that was the wrong decision for my child. I should have just pulled him off of that stupid fence and risked the injuries for him because yeah, it's just, I don't know, man. I can't make the right decision on that. But I had no way to get out. I was so upset because the gate was padlocked and chained. The front door was padlocked, and I had no way to go and I can't climb that privacy fence the way that I'm dressed. I just couldn't do it. So I had to I was just screaming in rage because I couldn't get to my child. And I had to run in the house, run to the front door. Ah, fuck, this is locked too. I can't get out of this prison. And I had to run all the way downstairs through the basement to the back bottom door and out that way. And he was already down the street at the corner by then, and I just couldn't I couldn't catch him. So anyway, you can find that episode and have a listen if you haven't already. It's the part two of Let's Get Through These Severe Autism Summer Blues. It's just called part two eloping. Let's get through these severe autism summer blues. It's technically the third episode. And in that episode, I share some ideas to help minimize risk of danger from elopement. And in between all of that, he's still misbehaving at camp and we have to go pick him up every day, but we try to give him a social life and we try to balance everything. We don't want to reward him for bad behavior, and sometimes we actually grounded him from going to camp, which really sucked because there's nothing else that he wants to do, and if he's grounded, there's nothing that he can do. I remember one time of him getting grounded. It might have been from the eloping. Ugh, it all just blends together at this point. If I knew I was gonna do this podcast, I would have kept detailed notes, but I didn't know. Um, but there was one time when he was grounded to his room. His dad grounded him. His dad's always the one that grounds him to his room. I'm not the disciplinarian. I'm just, I try to be scary, but it's not really I don't really do anything, you know? Anyway, he's grounded, and I walked in there one day and it stunk and his floor was wet, and he had decided, he had been grounded like 18 times by then, just constantly getting grounded. He decided that since he wasn't allowed to leave his room, well, he just wasn't ever gonna leave his room, and he just pissed on his floor. And mind you, these are unfinished hardwood floors. They're not even real hardwood floor. I mean, I don't know what to say about them, but not great. Not a great idea. I was so mad about that. And he was he was mad. He was like really obstinate and just looking at me like, yeah, what are you gonna do? Yeah, I pissed on my floor. So I just couldn't believe it. He was just a different kid than I had ever remembered him being, especially that day. So yeah, you know, it just started, it was like a war constantly. And every once in a while he would do something like that where he was showing that, you know, I am using my brain and I am not compliant. And it was his way of being a rebellious teenager, I guess. But it's awful when he doesn't talk. All he does is scream and hurt himself and ruin everything. It was just rough. But after he eloped, everything changed. Because as I have mentioned before, our plan was that when he became 18, I would be his paid caregiver and his dad would still be raking in a bunch of money from our sales business. So even though we stopped our business, he could still go become a contractor for somebody else and make really good money, and I could still plan to get paid as his caregiver, which I have been all his life. Ever since I've met him, I've been his caregiver. But once he eloped and, in my opinion, damn near died from it, his dad could no longer work because it was very clear that I alone could not keep him safe. I could not keep him locked down. It's too easy for him to overpower me. I don't know, I just can't I can't do it. Not like that. So his dad had to quit his lucrative career options that he was in. He had to guard the house. You he sat on the back porch for weeks, just staring at the gate in the middle of summer, just no shade, no I mean, it was it was miserable, and that's what he did. So while he's doing that, he's searching for solutions. I'm searching for solutions. I couldn't find anything. Did you know the tale of a desperate mother is in this question? Did you know that they sell leg irons on Amazon? Yeah. Uh no, I don't use them, but during my desperate searches for how the fuck do I keep this kid in the house? Um, I found leg irons on Amazon. So yeah. I can't I can't get a stun gun, but I can get leg irons. Can you believe that? So no, I never did, but they are in my cart. I was scared for his life, and I was open to pretty much anything at this time. So I have a pair of leg irons in my Amazon cart for all these years, they're still there. I don't know. It's kind of a novelty now, it's just something I can look at and laugh and be like, wow, I can't believe they sell these, you know. So while I was searching for all this stuff, I believe it was my spouse that actually got lucky and found Angel Sense. And I've talked in great length about this product and service in the past. And April is autism month, I believe. So there will be a pretty good deal on the Angel Sense tracker and services. There always is an extra sale. If you want to click my link at the bottom of this episode or any of my episodes, it would help me out and it doesn't cost you any more. And you could get your child hooked up with this Angel Sense GPS tracker and communication device and their services. So we get this great Angel Sense thing, and I figured out that I can tack it into his shorts, and he won't try to remove it. It's not very heavy. I mean, it's really impossible. He tears up everything on his clothing, and he has still not been able to tear this out of his clothes. So I thought that was like awesome. And I tried to figure out how to let the camp people know. So I tried to hook them up on the monitoring side, and they they emailed me and told me to please don't do that because apparently they were getting all of the notifications every time he moved out of bounds. So that didn't work out very well. But we were a lot more comfortable sending him to camp after learning that he would just elope without warning, and we knew that we could track him and we would get alerts and er I mean, it's just it's wonderful. So the rest of the summer, which was only a few more weeks probably, was a lot less stressful as far as the running away part, but he did run away a second time, and this time he got really far. And I believe what happened was his dad told him that they were going to go for a walk after his dad went to the bathroom. So his dad goes in the bathroom quickly and comes back out, and the kid is gone. But this time he had the angel sense monitor on him, and my spouse opened up the app on his phone and could see the route that he was taking. He didn't mention anything to me yet. He jumped in the Jeep and started driving, looking for him, going the way that the arrows said he went. He knew that he went through our neighborhood and into the woods through this one area where all of us always go into the woods. So he's in the car, he calls me from the car and asks me to go to our neighbor's house, the one whose refrigerator he trashed, and ask her for her car to go head him off at the other end of the woods where he would be coming out at this one street, which is kind of like a private driveway. And I didn't know what the hell was going on, but I'm like, uh, okay, so I go over there, she gets in the car and drives me down to this other street, and we find him. He had just crawled up out of the woods, I guess, because he's standing in the road peeing. She drives me down there and I get out and I let his dad know on the phone that we've got him, and it was kind of like approaching a wild animal. I'm like, hey, buddy, what you doing? You know, I didn't want him to run. I didn't know if he was mad or what. Because one thing about him is he hates getting dirty and he hates getting hot. He was covered in mud and it was hot as hell out there. So you know, from and from him running, he was sweating and I don't know. It was really weird. And I feel like, yeah, he escaped one more time during that summer, actually. And that time, I don't know. I think I'm sorry, this is completely messed up. Before we got the angel sense in the mail, he eloped again and he went into the woods, but we didn't know where he was. And I'm pretty sure I've told this story too. The cops were here, they were everywhere. We had the entire neighborhood looking. There's these kids that have four-wheelers and dirt bikes and stuff, and they found out we were looking for him, and they took their bikes out into the woods looking for him, and his dad was out in the woods, he had driven the truck down there, jumped out, was running through the woods, everyone's calling his name. The cops are talking to me in the yard, but I I don't know. I wasn't worried, I just knew. I knew he was in the woods. I just had a feeling that he was fine. And I don't know, that's weird because I don't have a biological tie to him. You know, a lot of moms can can say, Oh, I'm connected to my child. I felt he was safe or unsafe or whatever. I just I don't know, I just had a feeling. I wasn't as worried as his dad was, and I felt kind of bad about that, but I just knew in my heart that he was okay and that he was in the woods because we looked all the other places already, and I knew I just knew it. But it had been, geez, like an hour or 90 minutes that I was dealing with the cops in the front yard and everyone else is out there looking for him. I'm doing the entire thing of you know, height and weight and all that stuff. What was he wearing? Where would he go? He can't talk and all this stuff, and it was really a messed up summer with him running away all the time. But his dad had been right on top of him and didn't know. And usually when we call out his name, he can't resist answering, can't help himself, but he didn't answer. And all kinds of people were out there calling his name, and he finally got found by one of the neighborhood kids, and his dad was like, Where did you find him? And they showed him, and he's like, Fuck, I was standing right there. How did I miss him? But he was just down in the leaves and the dirt, and I don't know, maybe he was just thinking he was hiding and he was having fun. And I know that I talked about this because I was actually really happy for him because he was having fun and it was a nightmare, but it was also something that showed me that he was playing independently, and that's so rare, so rare. But yeah, he was in big trouble. We it's hard, you know, when you're so grateful that you find him, but you just want to just wring his neck for running away in the first place, and and then not answering when you're standing right on top of him like that. It just it was really hard for his dad. But finally the angel sense came, and then he eloped and we intercepted him at the driveway down the road. At that time, we kind of figured out because the most important thing to him is food, and he was going towards the grocery store. And either that or he was going towards the hotels, because you might remember me telling you that he thinks his birth mother lives at the Super Eight, and every time we would pass a super eight, he would start crying and you know, call for her. So it's all in the same general direction, but I know that the grocery store is first, and I believe by a couple of indicators later from him, I believe he was trying to get to the grocery store and get himself some foods that we had not been allowing him to eat. He was really going off the deep end wanting weird food that he doesn't normally eat, and he's usually okay with not eating it because he knows it makes him feel bad. But he had given some indicators that that's what he was after was the grocery store and these particular like sugary foods or whatever, maybe gluten-y foods or something. It was a real mind fuck for us as parents because I don't know about my spouse, but I began to feel like, oh my gosh, is he is he feeling neglected? Are we like are we preventing him from enjoying his life because of not letting him eat these foods? Like I felt like such a failure. Like I was failing him. I was trying so hard to make him happy, and all he wanted to do was run away to go to the grocery store. I mean, we give him everything, everything. You know, it got my heart like, oh, geez, does he feel like so micromanaged or something? Like what what is wrong? You know, I um it's so hard when he can't uh talk about it, and you just are left with your own stories. Your brain is telling you these stories like it's your fault. You are making him miserable, you are restricting things from his diet that he just wants so bad that he's willing to risk life and limb. You're a bad mom. You guys are bad parents. You guys suck. Look at him. He's running away from you all the time. He's putting his head through the wall, you know, it really starts to mess with you, and you start to think, well, ha hmm, maybe this is all my fault. Maybe if I just let him do whatever the hell he wanted, then he would stay home and he would swim at the park when they go, and he would not run away, and he would not pull his pants down at camp, and he would not ruin other people's property, and he would stop hurting himself. Maybe it's me. Hey, it's not you. It's really not. So to wrap this up, I want to tell you about his first day of school. This all went like bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, and then we had to go, and we were talking to the people at school several times, having meetings with them, trying to get them prepared for him, and all of that, in the middle of all this other shit that we had to deal with, and trying to get excited. The the school did really good acting excited. The school acted very excited. All the people there were like, oh yeah. And we were like, oh, geez, this sucks. So we're doing all the things, going through all the motions, taking all the steps, talking to the entire school staff and trying to get them to understand the meaning of the notebook and the importance of following the rules for our family and blah blah blah. Then the first day of school comes. We get up early, I make him a beautiful breakfast. He is just Satan. We're just trying like hell to be as nice as possible to him while he is verbally abusing us simply by screaming because he's not talking. Of course, there's the kicking and the scratching and the punching and the self-harm and all that stuff all day, every day, you know, and we're trying to ignore it and smile and be bubbly and redirect, redirect, redirect. Here comes this little short bus to pick him up. It pulls up in the driveway, his dad takes him out, and he is fussing the entire time. He wouldn't get on the bus. He was like not having it at all. His dad had to get on the bus and Get him on the bus. It was a nightmare just going through breakfast, get dressed, get on the bus. That was super hard. He gets on the bus. We're like, whew, thank God. Geez. We took a couple deep breaths, looked at each other and laughed and kind of high-fived, like, hey, we got through it. I turned around and looked out the picture window. We're the first house on this street. And I look out the window towards the street, the very street that he almost got run over on. And here comes the short bus. I said, Oh no, they're bringing him back. And he had only been gone like three minutes. His dad started laughing. Um, it wasn't his bus, but yeah, I thought he was see, that's how bad he was. He was so bad and so hard to be around. I thought the bus driver was like, hey, fuck this. We're bringing this kid home. I thought, oh shit, did he try to strangle the aide or did he try to choke out the bus driver? What happened? Why didn't he even make it to school? Why is he coming back? They're returning him to us, but no, they did not return him to us that day. There's apparently some other kids in the neighborhood who take a different short bus, and that's what happened. I do have some updates to share with you, and one of them is about the arm. You remember a few weeks ago, he had bitten his arm so badly that one of his teeth left a puncture wound, and uh I was really upset about it, and I didn't know what else to do, so I smacked it, like when you smack the back of someone's hand. That's pretty much what I did, but I did it not on the puncture side, because I wanted to get that cleaned up and I didn't want anything touching it. But before I took him to get that cleaned up, I smacked the part of his arm where he normally will bite. And it was just a quick smack, like, you know, like that. He looked at me like, oh, you know, and I was just hoping that he would get the point, you know. So a couple weeks after that, he wanted to show me his arm. I hadn't checked it in a while, and he was in a good mood in the morning because we were doing this morning routine, and he's standing at the top of the stairs being very cordial with me, and he said something, arm, arm, and he started lifting up his sleeve to show me his arm. And I was on my way back downstairs. I didn't really care to look at his arm, but he really wanted me to look at his arm. So I humored him and I looked, and there were no bruises, no teeth marks, nothing. And it had been a couple of weeks since the arm smack. And I think that he was proud of himself showing me that there were no new bite marks. And so I was like, wow, that's awesome. So I told his dad about it and how successful it was after I smacked his arm and showed him, I guess, that, you know, I don't want you to do this. And then he stopped doing it and he showed me. And I said, Man, if that's the way to do it, maybe I should just start smacking him in the head too. And I say that because he's always hitting his head on the wall. And if I want him to stop doing something, clearly he's showing me that smacking it gets the message across. No, I'm not gonna smack him in the head. It's just a little caregiver joke. Don't take me seriously. But it was a good laugh. And then I think just last week he was pissed off about something and he was in the bathroom chonging, and uh his dad's standing outside the bathroom door because he's trying to get him to go to bed, and he's making his last round of going to the bathroom before he gets put in bed. So his dad's just standing there, rolling his eyes like, geez, dude, stop, because he's in there just chonging and it echoes, you know, and he just loves that. It just keeps him in this hyped up loop and it gets worse and worse and worse. And he's just like, Come on, get out of the bathroom. So he's chonging, chonging, chonging, he opens the door, didn't even look at his dad, but knew he was standing there out of the peripheral, and he's like, chong, chong, chong, chong. I'm so tired, I'm so tired, okay? In the middle of all this chatter, he spoke that full sentence, I'm so tired, so tired. And he always says, Okay. So his dad thought that was pretty entertaining. And I just learned a trick. See, he is not allowed to wear sunglasses, and he doesn't like hats. His head's actually pretty large, and it's hard to get a hat on there comfortably and to actually make it function as a sun visor. Really weird. But he's not allowed to have sunglasses because the first thing he does is grab the lenses with his nasty little fingers and he'll just rip them off of his head, and then he'll throw a fit, and those are the first things to get thrown on the ground. He's ruined so many sunglasses. And we try to get it for him so that he can be comfortable outside, but he just won't have it. And we're just tired of dealing with it. So we're like, okay, no sunglasses then. You can wear visor hats, and he's like, no, I don't want any hats. So he'll just go out there and suffer. He scrooges up his face a lot and just tries to close his eyes and walk, and it's just like, dude, help us help you, you know. Well, I took it for a walk the other day, and you see, I used to grow medical cannabis. So I have these major grow lights, and they come with a specific type of sunglasses to help you see in the grow tent and protect your eyes from the lights. So I have a couple pairs and I'm not using them anymore. And I thought, you know what? I'm just gonna see if maybe he wants to use this. Maybe I'll just give him one of these. And so I was like, hey, you wanna go for a walk? And then I said, Let me put these on. No touchy, no touchy. He's like, okay, no touchy. I slide them on his head and he's like, Oh, I take him outside. He goes, Oh, sunglasses, sunglasses. And the coolest thing about it is that normally when we take him for walks, all we hear is I know feel good, I know feel good. And then it just goes on and on and on, this real deep voice, and then I know feel good. And then, you know, he'll try to walk right in front of you and ask for a hug while you're walking. It's just a nightmare to walk with him, but we make him walk. This time, with those sunglasses on, he didn't say a word the entire time, except a couple of things being happy about having sunglasses. They make everything look kind of green outside, and it just was so pleasing to him. He didn't say a word. And I told his dad, I'm like, hey, he didn't make noise the entire time. He's like, Really? I said, Yeah. So we went for a walk the next day, and I put those sunglasses on. I'm like, watch. So we go outside, put the sunglasses on. He goes, Oh, sunglasses, green, and that was it. He said, Look at green, look, green, but that was it. He didn't talk the entire time. And walking around this neighborhood is a mile. So we walk a whole mile in peace, and he's in a good mood the entire time. And when we get back to the house, he's still in a good mood. Usually we get about a quarter mile down the road and he's complaining that he doesn't feel good and that life sucks. And then by the time we get a quarter mile from the porch, again, he's ready to kill people, he's ready to run, he's ready to piss on your face, just whatever. And he didn't. He didn't care. He just got to the house. He's like, Thank you for sunglasses. He tries really hard lately to talk, and it was just really nice. I have found that when he does get his vitamin B complex that I give him, sometimes we forget. If we forget for too many days in a row, he goes back to like low functioning, and he's still low functioning according to the professionals. But when he has the vitamin B, he may be low functioning according to them, but according to us, he actually is better. So much so, in fact, that we just had a doctor appointment the other day, and I mentioned it to her, and I asked her about that leucovorin because I looked into that when it first got approved, and it's basically like B9, vitamin B9. It's like a supplement, it's not a pharmaceutical. I was like, hey, what do you think about that? And she looked into it, she didn't know about it, but she looked into it and she said, Well, it looks like they already pulled it and said they're not approving it. And we're like, Well, that shows that it works, then, you know. So she has a psychologist friend, and she's gonna ask her what she thinks about it, and she'll prescribe it to him if her friend says that it's a good deal. But even without the Luke of Vorin B9, he's got this B complex that I give him, and it's amazing. His intelligence is present, he's not as foggy and loopy, and he's actually trying to form words. For instance, this morning I go upstairs after the 15-minute window. I actually gave him 30 minutes because he's been really bad in the mornings lately, and 15 minutes isn't cutting it. So I gave him 30 and I went back up there and I was gonna ask him about breakfast and everything, and he was in a good mood, and instead of talking about breakfast, he wanted to talk about something else. And he said, He's very slow at forming these words, but he is trying. And he said, Can I spell magic word? I said, Oh, okay. Yes. He said, R E A L, real. Of course he doesn't say it as well as I do, but that's what he said. So then I said, Yes, real. Okay. He goes, yeah. And then he said, What's the magic word? I said, Real. He said, Yeah, good job. In his own way. Then I used it in a sentence a few minutes later, and he just loved it. He was so happy. Like he was teaching me something, you know. He was praising me, like, oh, good job. That was cool, you know. So that was really neat. And it's I don't know. The only thing that's different is that I've been diligently giving him the vitamin C and the B9, or I'm sorry, the vitamin C and the B complex. When his dad is, you know, doing the food and everything, he forgets. And that's another benefit to me doing the breakfast in the morning. I don't forget that stuff. But all of that was this morning while I was making his cream of rice cereal. He was really trying to talk. He was slow and deliberately forming words. They didn't make any sense, but it was fantastic, just the same. It was really neat. So those are my stories for now. I've got a couple more that I'm just gonna save for next time because, you know, I never know if he's gonna give me any good material or not. This was a long one. I feel privileged. He's been in bed this whole time, and uh, I just had all kinds of time to ramble on and on about this stuff. So, one more thing I wanted to tell you about before I end this episode is that when I was shopping for ways to keep him at home and found the leg irons and all the dumb stuff that I found, and we were still looking for a tracker of some sort, and we had not yet found Angel Sense, I was freaking out because of all the padlocks on everything. I know I said my spouse was not liking the locks everywhere on our little apartment doorway and all that stuff, but when I couldn't get out to save my son because the front door was padlocked, it really bothered me. It bothered me before because I thought, you know, what if there's a fire and we can't get out? Well, it's fine. You can break windows and get out. Okay, fine. But when I couldn't get out, I don't're gonna break a window to get out of the house to go chase my son down the street. That's different. I was just freaking out. So I was calling around the hospitals and stuff like that, trying to find out if there was anything. And I found something here in the Peoria area that is called the Autism Collective. I spoke with someone over there about what was going on and my concerns, and she said that there's a free thing, and I'm pretty sure I mentioned this in my eloping episode, but I'm just gonna say it again here. She said there's this thing called the little red box. Maybe it was the big red box. I can't remember, but I asked for one and it came to the house. And the most valuable thing at the time for us in that box was the stickers that they included that say, um, you know, there's a special needs person in this house. They may not respond verbally, they might uh freak out and attack you and act inappropriately. And I put that right on the front door window. That was the most valuable thing at the time. And to be honest, I was so stressed out with everything that I don't remember the rest of it. But it was actually a really nice special needs emergency box that they send out for free. I don't know if you run into something, some of these problems, and you're not hooked up with laces like that, you might try the fire department and the police department and ask them to do the legwork for you if they don't know what you're talking about. But they should know, the fire department should know because that's who those stickers are for. But just a little heads up for that, we do like to keep our son familiar with the police department and the fire department down the road. Every once in a while, we like to have him meet some of the officers and some of the emergency workers and first responders because um we want him to know that they're good. He always does know that, but sometimes we've had to threaten him with going to jail. And um, we're trying to make sure that he has a healthy outlook about police officers. You know, jail is bad, but police officers are good. God, we hope so. I mean, I've seen so many stories where they're not great, not educated, and they kill kids like ours, you know. But if they are familiar with him and he is familiar with them, then if something really weird pops off, then hopefully they are educated enough because we have made contact with them enough times and they know him by name and they know that he doesn't mean any harm, even if he's freaking out. So you might consider doing stuff like that if you haven't already. I'm sure you, you know, I'm sure most of you are on top of it, but it's really overwhelming this lifestyle, and we can't think of everything all the time on our own. So hopefully that helps somebody out there. My next episode, I will tell you about some more of his antics that are destructive but hilarious because I'm not the target and our neighbors aren't the target. And please remember you can always reach out to me at contact.parentingsevereautism at gmail.com. If you have any questions, comments, or stories, please drop me a line. Thank you for being here. Good luck out there. You hang in there. You're a superhero.