I'm grounded...

Or at least P is grounded to me, anyway. Everytime we turned around over the last week, he was breaking, destroying, or damaging something. I don't know how many gouges he's put in the walls. He's also marked on them with ink, pencil, crayon, and Hotwheels cars (they scratch the paint and otherwise leave lovely markings). He's taken apart the vacuum cleaner, dumped out laundry baskets full of clothes, dumped out tubs of dress-up clothes & toys, and ripped important papers to shreds. He's stabbed pencils through his homework, put gouges in the tables, and sprayed water all over the bathroom. So instead of grounding him to his bed, where he has easy access to two walls, I grounded him to me.

Yes, everywhere I go, he must go, with the exception of the bathroom. There is a chair in the middle of the living room (far away enough from everything that he can't touch anything else) that he must sit in if I am in the living room, dining room, or kitchen (all one big room, really). There is also a chair in my bedroom that he must sit in if I'm at the computer or in the bathroom. I accompany him when he must use the bathroom. This is getting old pretty quick, but for at least a full 24 hours, he hasn't destroyed anything except a piece of paper. It could be working.

I'm not being awful and horrible about it - there are times throughout the day when he gets a break from sitting in the chair. He sat with me yesterday at the table and did writing exercises. He got to hold Trixie while he was in the chair last night. Other times throughout the day, I turned on the tv and let him watch kids' programming. He got to play with the little computerized alphabet game thingie for a while. He go to fold laundry, as well. It's not like he has nothing to do...he just can't destroy everything in sight.

The only problem is - by grounding him to me, I got grounded to him as well!