This was also the year other things started to happen....the violent acts began about this time. Nothing out of anger, but when you are dealing with others getting hurt you have to stop the acts first, THEN look at why they are happening. For example, every morning Matthew would go wake up Rachel, nothing out of the ordinary there, it was just the way he did it that upset us so much! His method of waking her up each morning was to either LITERALLY pull out a handful of her hair or to bash her in the face/head with a tonka truck or any other hard item he could find!! This was a terrifying time for everyone except Matthew, who just didn't seem to be able to grasp what he had done. He just seemed oblivious to anything except his constant need to move, run and touch.  It seemed as though he just didn't care about anything!

      It was also during this time that his aggressiveness started to reach beyond his torturing of his sister and he began to hit everyone else also. I never saw any signs of anger during these times, it just always seemed as though he would get a sudden burst of energy and didn't know what to do with it, only that he HAD to expend it and fast! Picking up an object and bashing someone upside the head or hitting them as he ran by just seemed to satisfy that little something inside of my son, that little something that didn't have a name as of yet.

      It was such a strange time for us, here we had this child who did all these things, but never out of anger....we couldn't understand it! Then there was something else...his complete lack of fear. He had no sense of danger at all! He was afraid of nothing and seemed to think that nothing could hurt him. It was the latter that became my worst fear. We live on a 1/2 acre lot...the whole lot is fenced in and we had an assortment of latches on the gate, but Matt, being the genius at figuring out puzzles, would always figure out how to get them undone and sneak outside of the fence. For the most part I would find him quietly playing on the grass just outside the fence and I would simply go get him, bring him back in and redo the latches and change them around hoping that just maybe that would hold him in. It was when I discovered how far his lack of a sense of danger went that I learned that this child couldn't be unsupervised for even a few moments! This great learning experience came about when I found him outside the gate again, playing on the grass again..... until a car came down the road. That's when Matt stood up, looked at the car for a second then walked out into the street and stood there right in the cars path, staring at it!!!! Luckily for all involved, the driver of the car was going slow and was paying attention!