Bird on the Street

Fear

10:01 pm

Fear–such an obvious topic for a special needs mom to talk about, right? I mean, I should be filled with The Fear–will my child walk? Will he hold a job? What will happen to him when I die? But here’s a confession: I cope with all of these things using the Scarlett O’hara method–I just don’t think about it. Maybe not the best solution, but I’ve never actually solved a problem by worrying about it in advance and I spent a lot of Charlie’s infant days worrying abut things that never happened or if they did happen, it was as big a deal as I thought.

So basically it’s taken me a paragraph to tell you that it’s Charlie’s fears that I’m thinking about today.

Charlie’s a tough little kid. I doesn’t cry at blood draws. He handled a bunch of Botox shots in a way that I don’t think I could have. He’s very tough, but lately I’ve noticed that he’s gotten extremely fearful.

He used to love the water, but now he’s not capable of enjoying the pool at all, which makes me very sad. He will sit in the bathtub, but if I lie him down in the water, he is frozen with fear and claws at the sides of the tub.

The other day I sat him on the bottom step of our porch and he twisted awkwardly to grip the step behind him. He’s really good at sitting on a bench with feet flat, but when put in a new situation, he freaked out.

I’m glad he has awareness. We spent years dealing with medication fog, and it’s positive that he’s taking things in and processing them. I don’t want him to be scared of the world, though. Right now the twins are in a pulling up phase and about a million times a day I say, “It’s OK! People fall. Just get back up.” How can I teach Charlie that same thing?

Caution is good, but a four-year-old shouldn’t be fearful. I know he’s working with a body that doesn’t always do what he wants it to, but I want him to try. I want him to push. If he doesn’t, I can’t imagine he’ll go very far. I don’t know if this is some sort of stage, or if there are deeper things going on that need to be addressed.

So often I find myself sitting around wondering what the next step is–trying to find the path when it’s not clear. It’s one part intuition, two parts Google search, three parts the wisdom of others, and praying like hell I don’t screw it up too badly.

Too busy booging to look at Mommy's camera.

Filed Underparenting

Sleep Success

8:06 am

Well, since my last bedtime post, we’ve been working an tweaking the ritual, trying lot so new and different things and also reading a lot on children and sleep issues.

Two things stood out for me in my reading: the first, was the neurologist’s assertion that some brain injured kids don’t need as much sleep as typical children. I’d never considered that. The second thing was an article that said that trouble falling asleep is most-like an issue related to routine.

I went with the easy way out first–I enforced zero bedtime. This resulted in several nights where he was up past eleven. Eventually he would whine or fall asleep on the floor and we’d put him in bed.

Then he’d sleep half the day at school, which was the opposite of what we were going for.

Then, I switched things up and put him in bed at “bed time,” but letting him play with whatever he wanted. This went well, but he was still up til almost eleven–an improvement, but not a great one.

Further research revealed that problems with going to sleep are often a result of not having a good bedtime routine. Sigh. I’m not a fan of routines. I also find that the more pregnant I get, the less I feel like doing anything in the evening.

But we did it anyway. We stuck to a very rigid 9:00 bedtime, which is later than most four-year-olds, but acceptable to me. We follow the exact same routine every evening.

Guess what? It’s working.

He’s falling asleep before 10:30 every night. He takes about a one hour nap at school. He doesn’t wake up in the middle of the night crying.

He’s also in a better mood during the day, participating more in therapy, and just generally seems happier.

It’s not a miracle cure–we’ve had a bad night or two, but it sure beats the night after night of getting up at two and three in the morning, and the hours of screaming before bed.

I’ll continue to keep y’all posted, but MAN is this better than before.

PS: I finished this post last night and OF COURSE we had a rough sleepless night–luckily, we knew what we’d done wrong, which makes the sleepless nights a lot easier.

Filed Undermedical, parenting

Good Enough

1:11 pm

I’ve been a little quiet recently. Two weeks ago my husband left to do two weeks of service in the Air National Guard. He’s been out of the military for several years, but recently we decided that the Guard offered some advantages we couldn’t ignore–mainly their super-cheap and generous insurance plans.

So, for the first time ever, I’ve been mothering three children by myself. I’ve had a lot of help in and out, but the truth is that it’s been tough. Sleep has been hard to come by, and I am very glad to be done with the single parent gig. By the time you read this, Hubby will be back and I will mostly likely be fast asleep in my bed.

But tonight I sit back and make a little toast (with water, sadly) to Good Enough Parenting.

To kids who spend the whole day in their pajamas.

To dirty floors with a blanket thrown on top, so the babies can play.

To peanut butter sandwiches for dinner.

To uniforms that aren’t “that” dirty.

And putting kids on the bus in my PJs.

To eating dinner with the TV on.

To picking a bedtime story based on how short it is.

And to food that comes in a box.

I raise a toast to good enough parenting because some days good parenting just isn’t an option.

Cheers.