I have to be careful about knowing where Bub is at in the house and checking on him when he gets “too quiet”, which is always a sign that he is up to something that he doesn’t want anyone else to become aware of. We have had to take one of the toilets in our house off of the ground seven times since this behavior started, but Bub will also go through periods where he is transfixed with flushing items down the toilet that are not supposed to go down the toilet, or anywhere near the toilet, and then make himself scarce from the restroom as fast as possible with the intent to avoid detection. Sometimes it does not immediately become apparent that he has flushed something down the toilet that eventually becomes problematic, although if an adult sees him rushing out of the restroom they know to check the toilet and to check the surrounding area for any “missing things” that he could have grabbed on a whim to flush down the toilet. A few times he has actually come close to causing some… slightly expensive damage, but fortunately he has not been able to flush anything down the toilet that isn’t supposed to be flushed so thoroughly that he has succeeded in that.

This is something else that he goes through “phases” in for some strange reason, and I have yet to figure out why, or what the reasons are for any of his problem behaviors that have these phases. I mean, one time he actually managed to flush a small plastic cup down the toilet (I’m still not completely sure how he did this, but he did), and he got it to go a decent way down the toilet, which really stopped it up after a few flushes… and this was something that we had to figure out by looking around for “the missing object” while the toilet was randomly overflowing. Even knowing that he had to crinkle the cup to get it to go down the toilet and obviously being there for the experience and removal, I am still not entirely sure how he managed that…

When there’s a will, there’s a way. When Bub wants to do something, he will try extremely hard to.

For some reason, Bub is transfixed with pouring things like seasoning salt into the trash can… and there were two occasions where he actually took some of his homeschool plants and poured the soil from them into the kitchen sink because they were within his reach. Luckily nothing had been growing in them all the times that he did this, because for the life of me I couldn’t get a single daisy to start from a pack of seeds that I had (and I’ve gotten plenty of things to grow in the past, so I speculate that the problem was the batch of seeds, not me), and he did this after I had simply put a fresh batch of soil into the pots. I’m still confused.

I hide things where I can though in the hopes that he won’t as easily be able to get a hold of, or grab, certain things… and so far it has had mixed results because Bub is crafty and he can, in some cases, eventually find a way to what I’ve put “out of reach” to him. We’ve had several conversations about this, and I think that he understands enough after every conversation to stop engaging in this behavior, but for some reason it continues in cycles where he’s trying to reach for the seasoning that we use in our food to pour it somewhere (and sometimes it’s even been in the dog’s food that he’s poured it in, which has caused me to have to throw that food away and get her some fresh food) or dumping small pots of soil down the kitchen sink. Luckily the pots are so small that the soil effortlessly goes down the drain and passes through them, but the fact of the matter is that I don’t want him to be engaging in these behaviors at all and he seriously needs to stop them.

That, and it’s uncomfortable to “wait around the corner” for him to start this back up, because this behavior comes in cycles with him for some strange reason that I have yet to figure out. Sort of like with the toilet…