Further to previous postings about nightmare scenarios involving DS2 (age 6 with a type of cp/development delay/learning difficulties etc etc) escaping from his car seat, this morning he has really surpassed himself. Despite our best efforts at keeping him in his seat, this morning, DH was taking him from horse riding (RDA) to school, had to stop twice because he kept getting out of his 5 point harness (an apparently "impossible" mission) and on the third occasion, before DH knew what was happening, DS had yanked his seat sideways, opened the door and fallen out!!!!
The child lock on the door had been taken off. Normally they are both on, both sides, all the time. This is obviously a big oversight but occasinally we take one off if we are giving visitors a lift. We have always remembered to put in back on until this time. Thank God DH was only doing about 10mph (in traffic in a city centre!) and a passing workman, walking in the street, as he was working on a road nearby, caught DS before he actually hit the road. How lucky was this! There was a bus a few feet away, the next vehicle behind our car.
DH is still shaking and feeling sick. When they got to school the secretary made him a sweet coffee he was in such a state.
For a while we didn't take DS out without anyone else in the car to sit next to him and prevent him undoing the main seat belt (this is what then enables him to wiggle his top half out of the 5 point harness and move the seat along from the middle - where he always sits - if he is so inclined.) I posted before a horrible situation in which he had wound a window down and was trying to get DD's booster seat out of the window when I was doing 60mph on a dual carriageay!!! Took me long enough to get over that so God knows how DH feels. (The childlocks were on obviously on that occasion but we had made the serious error of leaving something (booster seat) within his reach.)
We have a Zafira so we then started folding the seat on the seat belt side of DS down to stop him reaching the buckle so easily. I knew he could still do it if he wanted to.. but he hadn't shown much interest in a while so we had thought DH might be ok on his own.. so I went to an exercise class! How guilty I now feel!
We have bought ALL the different gadgets for covering the seat belt buckles. He just takes them off. He can manouvere his fingers into anything; his hands are clumsy but very strong.
He is pretty much out or control in many respects. No idea how we are supposed to keep coping with all this behaviour. He laughed throughout this morning's escapade and happily told his one-to-one about it (in few word sentences as he does). He just doesn't care. It would be easy to say he has no understanding of what he is doing when he acts in these ways (hurting people is another of his latest things) but he does understand - he just doesn't care. And he has no fear of danger whatsoever.
Our long awaited move (to a house which is to be adapted with a ground floor extension for him) has been held up by lack of available OTs. They've not even started yet and we had hoped to move in early March. Knowing we are moving soon in the only thing that is keeping us sane. Live will be a bit easier in the new house; we have put lots of thought into making the very best of this move. We live for respite weekends (he goes for 6 hours every fortnight) and then we are too wiped out to do anything much with the time away from him, which isn't fair on the others, particularly DD. (8).
I fear for the future.