That was not a pleasant couple of days.

I mean, things started off fine. Work wrapped up early on Friday so I headed outside for a beer in the sunshine.

We had dinner, sketched out a plan for the weekend, and Daphne headed to bed at a normal hour.

This would be the last of the normalcy for about 48 hours.

Saturday we got out on the early-ish side (for us, anyway) and drove to the next hill over for the Burklyn Arts & Crafts show at Wildflower Inn. The weather was, unfortunately, uncooperative for the event. Windy, rainy, cold, and generally pretty bleh.
Because we’d parked in a freshly brush-hogged valley, I was unnerved by the prospect of getting out again if it really started to pour. Muddy ruts would be easily carved into the hillside exit, turning their impromptu parking area into a swampy quagmire.

So, after just one stroll through the aisles of luffing and flapping tents, Jen grabbed a matching painting from the artist we met at the Vermont Maple Festival…

and we beat a hasty retreat out of there before Morla started asking us for Zyrtec.

Sadly, I don’t have pictures of any of this because Daphne was YouTubin’ with my phone the entire time.

Our next stop was Jay Peak, which is about an hour from our place. We’d heard that, aside from having some of the best snowboarding powder in New England, they also had an indoor waterpark and that it’s a rather nice resort. (In NEK adjusted terms.) So we took a drive up too see for ourselves, as well as determine whether the indoor water park was something Daphne would be able to handle.

As I’ve said, water parks can be hit or miss with her.

We were pleasantly surprised on all counts.
Jay was quite nice, their trams were whirring along providing mountain views, some of their restaurants were open, and the water park was in full swing.

That blue thing on the right is a stationary wave and, as you can imagine, it was quite loud. As such, Daphne wasn’t sure about the whole scene as we nudged her through the door. She sat down next to me on a raised barstool with her ears covered tightly to block out the noise of rushing water…but she was rapt.
After about 10 minutes of watching, her little hands came off her ears and she started to get really excited, with lots of bouncing in her seat, double fist pumps, and wide-eyed grins.
Too excited.
Perhaps it was all the water rushing sounds, perhaps it was the humidity or chlorine smell, perhaps the sensory experience of it all was just too much… But, on one of her bounces, I heard a faint “splut!” sound when she landed on the seat. I looked beneath her and found her chair soaked, with drips from all sides running into a puddle beneath the bar.
Jen saw my face and followed my horrified gaze down to the new Daphne-installed Capri-Sun & Ammonia kidney pool.
Yes. In her excitement, Daph wet her pants.
Both of us stared at one another for a moment before Project Manager Dad slingshot into gear.

“Okay. We walked through a gift shop on our way in. I’ll go back and buy a pair of sweatpants. Just tie her sweatshirt around her waist and see if you can find a napkin or two for the chair while I’m gone. When I get back, you can take her to the changing room to put on the clean pants and then we’ll all make a silent break for the exit.”

[[[A couple clicks and whirs of the plan coming together later]]]

We were nearly out of the park when Daphne figured out what it was that we were doing. Or, more to the point, what it was we weren’t doing. Once it dawned on her that she wasn’t getting changed to go swimming, but that we were leaving, her world went crimson and she began to shriek.
No, not just shriek.
She pounded her fists against the walls, jumped, stomped, cried, threw herself on the ground, kicked, and basically tried like hell to claw her way back into the water park. (Shattering our attempt at a surreptitious exit.) It also ranks quite highly among the largest public meltdowns she’s ever had, all performed within the acoustic splendor of an extremely echo-y resort hallway.

We dragged her, literally at times, down the exit ramp and finally got outside…only to find that the rain had started really coming down. I opened our umbrella and essentially had to steer Daphne back to the car with one hand on the umbrella and the other on the scruff of her neck, all while she tried to twist and wrench away from me.

This is the first time that I’ve ever had to strong-arm my daughter…and it was absolutely horrible.
I’m sure for both of us.

We drove to Wendy’s for lunch while Daphne continued to convey just how unhappy she was by slamming her head against the car seat and pounding her fists on her neck and legs repeatedly. Because there was zero chance of us being able to enter a restaurant with her in such a state, I went inside, handled our order, and we ate quietly in the car.

She did calm down at this point, and very nearly smiled a couple of times. But the behavior continued sporadically once we got back home, with random bouts of yelling and aggression until she finally calmed and we sat down together.

Then, just before her bedtime, I noticed the couch (and by extension my leg) felt strangely damp. I stood up and realized that, yes, she’d had another accident. This time all over our couch.
And man, she absolutely soaked it.

Her mother shuttled her off to bed as I sat there with my head in my hands, broken.

It felt like I’d tried so hard to do something that would be fun for her…and it had gone so horribly wrong that she was still suffering hours afterward.
A roll of paper towel, feverish scrubbing with our shampooing pet vac, and 1/4 bottle of Febreze later, it still smelled like an NFL stadium urinal trough in our living room…

Which brings us neatly to Sunday doesn’t it?

So because almost every garment Daphne owns is roughly 3 sizes too small, we decided to go to the Gap Outlet in Lebanon for a new summer wardrobe. She was quite happy to be in the car, although she did keep tapping “pool. pool. pool.” on her talker.
We explained, repeatedly, that we were NOT on our way to the pool. And we reminded her that she had been an ill-behaved little girl the day before, so we would not be going swimming until she’d proven she could be good.
And yet, from the back seat, it continued…

We should have known at this point how this was going to end. But the hope of autism parents springs eternal, I guess.

At first, Daphne was quite helpful and engaged in picking out her own clothes. To be fair, she was doing a great job. But after about 10 or 15 minutes she started to whine. Then stomp. Then get agitated. So rather than risk a repeat performance, Jen decided to take her outside while I handled the rest of the shopping.

I came out 10 minutes later to Jen angrily buckling Daphne in the backseat of the car.

“She threw her talker when I told her we had to wait for you.”
“Ugh. Unacceptable…”
“No…I mean she threw it, threw it. This is what she just did to it.”

This was the straw that finally broke us as parents.

We didn’t speak a single word during the entire trip home. Daphne alternated between crying and laughing in the back seat, and still we said nothing.
Once in the house, Jen and I retreated to a parental corner before we said something aloud that we couldn’t take back.

Daphne went to bed a few hours later and we officially filed this weekend into the “Abject Failures” bin.

Daphne starts “summer school” tomorrow (twice a week, from 8:00 – 11:30) and those few hour respites will hopefully give us some time each day to collect ourselves. Because her recent meltdowns and bouts of aggression have been difficult on us, to say the least. I find myself wondering how we can fix it and pull out of the steadily downward trajectory that we’ve been in over this last year…

Is this just our new normal?

Will it get worse from here?

j.s.