Baby Boy was discharged from the hospital on Saturday. The first thing I noticed when we arrived was how disorganized his thoughts and behavior still was. I asked the charge nurse if he had been this way since his admission or if this was just excitement over going home and he said that he had been like that for the duration.

The changes the hospital doctor made to his medication was to taper him off of Xanax during the 5 days that he was there, moved his Abilify to
bedtime instead of morning and made the Seroquel at bedtime permanent as opposed to as needed. He kept him on the 100 mg Lamictal at morning and noon and 200 mg at bedtime. At least he is finally sleeping again and the voices and visions have drastically minimized.

Baby Boy is very slowly starting show some progress at home towards being less violent and and defiant but it is still very obvious that he is cycling frequently through the day and responding to the slightest of stresses with outbursts of rage. The staff at the hospital said they had to frequently redirect his behavior, when we calmly attempt this at home he becomes agitated and aggressive.

Whenever he is in a calm state and I attempt to calmly and quietly work with him on the things we talked about during our family session at the hospital, such as creating a daily schedule that he can see and follow for more structure and practicing going to time-out calmly, and how to ignore his big brothers so that they don’t have the power to trigger him, he becomes violent and it triggers another round of mania. I’ve emailed his regular psychiatrist with all of this information. I think he’s either going through Xanax withdrawal still or Lamictal alone as a mood stabilizer during the day just isn’t going to do the job.

And yet somehow through it all, we’ve been able to complete our homeschool lessons yesterday and today. Granted, it took much longer than it used to but we made it through. Today was better than yesterday which left me with bruised shins and multiple bite bruises received when attempting to stop him from rhythmically beating his head on the wall.

Tonight was actually a rather good night for him, too. The first since he’s been back home. He and Bonus Boy both got in trouble and landed themselves in timeout for cursing out Boy #2 because he was fighting off a migraine and didn’t want to take them for a walk. They didn’t think I was within hearing distance. They were wrong and both were sent to the kitchen table for time-out. Poor child, I think it helped to have a partner in time-out. Something about it made him stop and think about what he had been doing the last three days and we had a good talk when it was over. Now, if he just remembers it in the morning. *sigh*