Sleep

Enough seep is like emotional salve. It makes all the difference. This is true for most people, but for Jackson - it's the most critical aspect of protecting his schedule. He's not buoyant or flexible with regard to sleep. If he gets shorted, more coffee or tea cannot possibly make up the difference. Only more sleep will help. Without enough sleep, he has trouble coping with much. He's rigid, demanding and insufferable.

They say that sleep is when your brain recharges, reboots, and categorizes everything that happened during the day. For Jackson, getting enough sleep is critical because his brain does actually seem like a crash site when he doesn't. The pieces don't fit together anymore and everything comes out mangled.
It's almost like - when he doesn't - he's immediately thrown into a retrograde of emotional energy. He comes apart, can't control the connection between his words and his thoughts and is no longer able to remember what he's learned with respect to social conventions.
A few nights of good sleep will put him right back where he needs to be.

Jackson has never been one to say, "My stomach hurts" or "I'm tired!" When he was really little, the only way that I had even the slightest clue that he was sick was . by the way he acted. Even then, the changes in his behavior were so minimal, sometimes I missed it or attributed it to a behavioral response instead of a physical symptom. What parent wouldn't assume his or her two year old was acting weird by having a temper tantrum and instead think, "I wonder if he has an earache?" Only when the consistency of the change in his behavior was noticed, did I put two and two together and get him to the doctor. Parent-peers and family members would look at me like I was parenting with something comparable to a Ouija board when I would respond to remarks from teachers regarding behavior issues at school with,"Okay, looks like we need to go to the doctor and see what's going on."
If it weren't for the fact that I was right every single time - I'd say they were justified. But Jackson and his need to keep away from the edge was so good at covering up and or dismissing the outlier that is 'illness' - I had little alternative.
If he would have only been so kind as to run a fever, or throw up, or start coughing, but he didn't. Not once.