Sorry For Not Blogging

I haven't had much time for blogging lately, and I thought I should take a minute to tell my faithful readers why. Bagel has taken up a lot of my time lately. He doesn't sleep at night and he won't nap, and he's been very difficult to deal with. He has about a two-week cycle where he goes from having a full night's sleep to skipping naps to an unstable but inadequate sleep schedule, and culminating in a total meltdown where he can't function at all or even eat, and finally he falls asleep for the better part of 24 hours and the cycle resets. He's had ongoing problems with biting and a lot of other things, and I'd tried to deal with these problems separately without any luck. Then I listened to a program on Asperger's Syndrome, and the lightbulb came on. While I'm not sure if Bagel has Asperger's Syndrome or maybe something related, it's becoming apparent to me that all these problems have a single source, and I suspect that it has to do with how sensitive Bagel is to stimulation. He seeks out stimulation all the time but it's too much for him to take. The lack of sleep may be caused by overstimulation, and the rest of the problems are exacerbated by lack of sleep. Looking back I can see that these problems have gone back to when he was a tiny baby, but I just thought it was my lack of parenting skills that was making it harder to deal with than my other kids were (and make no mistake, my other kids were difficult too, but Bagel trumps them all).

I'm in the process of arranging for Bagel to be evaluated, and until we have a diagnosis and some sort of therapy regime or other solution to the problem, it's going to be difficult to find time to blog when he's in an unstable sleep pattern like he is now. Even as I type he is insisting I have to hold him and pushing buttons on the computer, because when he's overtired he can't just play by himself, he will totally melt down unless he has my entire attention. You can never tell when he's going to explode into a full screaming meltdown, and you long for the day when he gets so overtired that he just sleeps the entire day and night and re-sets his cycle.