I dare you!

My husband was out of town last week, which usually makes me nervous.  I never used to be like this, having lived alone for a number of years.  But since getting married to my Army trained, biker, bad boy, I have kind of become lackadaisical on those kinds of things.  Now, I like knowing that my husband will protect me, the kids and the house if anyone should attempt to break in with ill intentions, so when he is out of town my guard always goes up.  I actually go a little overboard with nightly preparations before we go to bed.  I lock all the doors at night, check the windows, put objects in front of the doors in hopes that I will hear them knock over if someone breaks in, and take two phones to bed.  Yeah, I get paranoid, to say the least.  I also shut off all the lights to make the house entirely dark, with the rationale that I will know my house better than any intruder and would have the advantage over them.  To do what, I am not sure but I think I will figure that out if the situation arises.  It wasn't until the other night that I realized that if someone should happen to break into our home, that they would be in for quite a challenge. 

Let me start out by saying that my husband rarely goes out of town for work.  Maybe twice a year at the most, and usually its for only a few days.  This last trip, my husband was gone for a lot longer than usual and it had been a long while since his last trip.  Because of this, my aspie was thrown completely off and really struggled with my husband not being around.  The first night was okay because I kept both boys busy with fun activities, but by the second night I had a real problem on my hands.  During the day, we have preschool, therapy and social groups to go to so my aspie didn't really notice any difference.  But by night two, when my husband called to talk to us, my aspie cried uncontrollably.  He couldn't understand why his daddy couldn't be at home.  When my hubbie tried to explain it was for work, my son thought that now my husband will never come home from work and things went from bad to worse.  After over an hour of talking with his daddy, and me calming down the baby who was crying because his big brother was crying, my aspie finally cried himself to sleep.  The next day, he went into complete train obsession and only really spoke in movie quotations.  He didn't eat to much, and he was just not himself.  If we left the house, he seemed to be okay, but as soon as we got back home he went back into it.  I realized that his routine was changed, Daddy was not a home at night to play with him and therefore, it through him for a major loop.  His train building was extensive and instead of taking them down, he wouldn't let me touch them.  I wish I would have taken a picture of them, because they are quite amazing, but I didn't think of it at the time.  He had train tracks and layouts going from the dining room to the living room, around the coffee table, up onto the couch and down again.  Upstairs, they went into each bedroom, with a major train station or piece of equipment located in just precisely the way he wanted it.  There were blue tracks for certain trains, wooden tracks for others and even a "baby" track he built for the baby, mainly so the baby wouldn't touch his trains.  They were all impressive. 

By night four, my aspie was a little better with my husband being gone and went to bed quite well.  I took advantage of some alone time by getting a glass of wine, preparing my nightly security routine, and then settling down to watch some recorded shows I missed out on.  Some four hours later, I woke up to the tv being off due to no activity and the feeling like a skunk crawled into my mouth and sprayed. There went my "me" time I thought to myself.  Because I had shut off all the lights during my nightly routine it was very dark, and being in mid-sleep I completely forgot about the train maze that was through out my house as I started towards the kitchen for a drink.  I made it about three steps when I stepped on a train.  Now, I am not sure if you have ever stepped on a Thomas the Train toy, but let me tell you it hurts like no other toy.  These things have funnels sticking up, magnets to connect to each other and are made of usually metal or some other crazy material. Its basically like stepping on hard dull spikes of a fork.  Match box cars also are painful, but I still think trains are worse.  Its the kind of pain that immediately makes you tear up, and so of course I cussed.  My cussing caused my three dogs to start to bark and come running downstairs thinking someone was in the house.  The stampede of dogs cause me to take yet another step, which I then stepped on some sort of train decoration, which then caused me to stumble and fall.  As I was falling I grabed onto what I though was the staircase post, but was chair I had put to throw off intruders which then also fell onto the tracks.  This caused me to cuss more, but by then I was surrounded by happy loving dogs who were licking me while I was down happy to see me.  This was not funny and joyous to me at the time because I had just landed on another train.  By the time I got to my feet again, the baby was crying from all the commotion, and my aspie was standing on the stairs.  When he turned on the lights, he first said, "Mommy, is that you?"  Yes, its me, I'm fine, I just tripped and fell.  "Mommy, looked what you did to my trains!  You made a mess!"  As he had his hand on his head shaking it in disappointment.  Yes, I know honey, we will fix it in the morning, get back to bed.  I knew that was never going to happen, because once my aspie is up, he has a dreadful time going back to sleep.  With the lights now on, my dogs are whining at the door to go outside thinking its morning, and the baby has made it to the steps but hasn't stopped crying.  You have got to be kidding me!  One innocent attempt to watch some tv by myself caused this whole strings of unfortunate events.  Two to three hours later (I'm not sure because I fell asleep during the showing of Ice Age) both kids had fallen back to sleep in my bed, the trains were fixed back to pre-crazy conditions, and all the dogs  had peed and are now in bed with us. 

As I started to fall back to sleep that night, two thoughts popped into my head. First, I dare some robber to break into this house.  If my husband's home, they will have to face him.  If he's not, they will have to face the obstacle course that we call a home.  If the dogs don't stop them, the trains might.  And if that doesn't work, the wrath of my aspie from messing up his trains definitely will.  So, I decided that I wouldn't worry so much about break-ins anymore.  And if someone does, i hope I have time to get a on film because I am sure it will go viral as one of the worse robbery attempts ever.  My second thought was that I never did get that drink that I set out to get in the first place.      

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