After I spent Friday evening and most of yesterday at my curling club for a bonspiel, I spent a few hours with the kids so my wife could get away from them.

In the course of this adventure, I decided that the Monster’s nails needed a trim.  As I’ve mentioned on multiple occasions, he likes to squeeze things when he’s not happy – usually me, but sometimes his brother – and tends to dig his nails in, so I thought I’d just take care of it really quickly.  He was being nicely compliant, letting me cut his nails with a clipper… until he wriggled and I missed.

We all know that ‘missing’ isn’t usually that serious of an injury.  It can be a bit bloody, but it looks worse than it is… but then you have the Monster and his Autism complicating things, namely that he has few tools at his disposal to express that it hurts and that he’s not happy that I cut him.  Plus, he doesn’t like to have band-aids put on him, and as mentioned, he was bleeding.

So you can picture it.  I’m trying to get him calmed down, with no idea as to when his mother’s going to be home to help me.  He’s screaming, crying, insisting on various things without any real coherent thought behind them, though that changes whenever I’m trying to clean off his finger or get a band-aid on him.

After about twenty minutes, I managed to successfully get a band-aid on him (by wrapping my legs around him and managing to calm him enough to stick it onto him while he was distracted), so that I could at least clean up the blood and get things back to ‘normal’.  I kind of feel like an awful parent for having to basically wrestle him to do first aid… but at least it’ll heal.