From Chaos to Calmness

Working in a special needs classroom has its challenges.  Working with a nonverbal autistic child who is not happy can be overwhelmingly frustrating.  This past Tues and Wed, J. had major meltdowns at lunch and when I say major meltdown I mean that one moment he seems fine and the next he's jumping up and down, screaming, and trying to scratch and bite anyone who's around.  Now I am very familiar with handling one of J's meltdown in the classroom.  Usually I know exactly why he's melting down and can get him away from people and calmed down after several LONG minutes.  A meltdown in the cafeteria is harder to deal with because the space is significantly larger, there are far more people around, and the other assistant I was working with doesn't have a clue as to how to handle these situation.  In these sorts of situations my two main goals is to keep everyone close to J as safe as possible and to get Kerri (his teacher for the past 4 years).  I knew we were in trouble when J went to bite Kerri several times on Wed.  During the past 3 years I have NEVER seen him try to bite her as she's pretty much his second mom.  Even Kerri didn't know what was wrong with J.

By the end of Wed I was more than exhausted.  As soon as I got in my car after school the tears started.  I felt completely hopeless and I really didn't want to go to work the next day.  In fact, I wasn't even sure I wanted to continue working with kids.  It was just one of those days.  I started praying - praying for clarity, for J to be calm, cooperative, and peaceful, for continued protection, and for a renewed passion.

Thursday morning J came into school calmly and things seemed to going as smoothly as possible.  I went to lunch and when I came back it was recess time for the kids.  I learned that while I was gone J had another tantrum.  As we were coming in from recess one of the assistants noticed that J had blood smeared on his cheek.  At first we thought that maybe during his tantrum he had injured himself.  After further inspection we realized that J had lost a tooth.  The loose tooth was what had been bothering him all along.  He had been trying to tell us by occasionally putting our hands on his cheek and his meltdowns were always after he ate something hard or chewy.  Unfortunately we don't always connect the dots :(.

For the remainder of Thursday, both J and I were ecstatic!  In fact, J was even able to mimic "Oh yeah!" in the exact pitch and tone that the OT used.  By the end of Thursday, all of my prayers had been answered :).