Zachy Q

Zachary was the sweetest baby ever.  He wanted to be held every day, all day long for the first 4.8 years of his life, which includes today. He was born in Hawaii, and was really ahead of the curve when it came to gross motor skills. He was crawling, walking (and climbing out of his crib) incredibly early.  He was always a terrible sleeper.   The year he turned 2, I stood outside his room and escorted him to back to bed (followed by other disciplinary measures as the evening wore on) EVERY SINGLE NIGHT for over 9 months with100% consistency and made zero progress in getting Zachy to stay in bed and sleep.  Eventually I just gave up and let him stay up with us.  When Joe and I would go to bed at night, he would follow us there and lay between us. His sleep got worse and worse until eventually he was only sleeping a couple of hours at night. We started using Melatonin in spring 2014, and that has really helped. He has improved so much, even though he still isn't a terrific sleeper.

We moved to Leavenworth the summer before he turned 3. That was about the time we saw his temper start to flare. I had a pretty rough pregnancy with Charlie, so I attributed a lot of his problems to lack of consistent discipline (tired mommy syndrome).  We began spending more time with Zach, while maintaining a zero-tolerance policy for tantrums, which really didn't seem to help. It seemed he was in time-out all day. In fact, some days he WAS in time out for the entire day.  

He also had some odd little idiosyncrasies. While we lived in Hawaii, he wore his bathing suit all day, every day (he had several he alternated between). He wanted to go to the beach, he said, and we thought it was cute and funny. When we moved to Kansas in the summer he continued to wear his bathing suit. Then as the weather got colder and colder we could not get him out of that suit.  Eventually we hid all the bathing suits and he began wearing black sweat pants and certain long sleeved shirts. Now, here we are, two years later, and he will still only wear sweat pants and long sleeved shirts (he has 4 shirts with faces that he rotates).

He's happy to take a bath, if it's his idea. Otherwise he will raise quite a fuss. He is just very rigid about his world. 

Some notable tantrums:  I left on an errand, leaving Z with Rochelle. He was so mad that I left that he shattered the screen of our big TV. 
He wanted a smoothie, and I was making breakfast for Joe (4 poached eggs in the microwave, it takes 2 minutes of my attention at the most). He started yelling and screaming and knocking over chairs because I wouldn't do what he wanted that instant. 

Zach was diagnosed with autism this spring. While he has good eye contact and basic communication, his hyper-rigidity and volatile temper makes it difficult for him to function in life.