Thursday, October 9, 2014

Teaching Kids to Eat Sawdust

Today somehow became a whirlwind of appointments & confusion! When we finally made it home around 5pm I could hardly keep my eyes open! I was so exhausted. Our activity seemed to have filled up the invisible chargers on our children, you'd think we had been feeding them candy all day long. Their kid batteries were at 110%!

I took Willow & Judah to a park play date in S. Salem. It turned out to be a WARM day! After playing in the sun for a while I was damn near sweating! Judah had fun climbing with the boys. Willow seemed bored. I played with her while she served me fake food (handfuls of sawdust chips that I had to pretend to eat). Our little drive-thru activity drew a tiny crowd of children. I was the only adult playing - I looked ridiculous. Two of the moms kept telling their boys to leave our imaginary food activity, as if it was not something the boys should be doing... later one of those boys found me and handed me a pile of sawdust chips, telling me that he had made me cookies. Sweetness. Before he could hand me my sawdust cookies, his mother yelled for him to get back over to her & to stop doing what he was doing. Ugh, so ridiculous. I gave him a great, big, lovely "thank you" right in front of her. There are times when you just can't even pretend to be on the same Mom team. That was one of those times. It was really cool to see how using your imagination can draw kids in so easily. Willow instantly had kids surrounding her wanting to play.

We came home. J's aide took him to the library. W & I went to get Sebastian & run some errands. Sebastian gets so upset when he finds out that we went on play dates without him. Somehow that came up.. and led to, "I hate Willow's friends!!!!!!!!!!" He didn't even know that we had a play date today. He was just remembering one day when we had a meet-up play date at the house while he was at school.. 2 little girls that Willow had played with once before came over to play for an hour. Being a kid is hard!! And Willow really doesn't have any consistent friends. Any kid near her height is her "friend" according to her. Poor Sebastian, Willow has a world of friends everywhere we go!!!

Willow & Judah chased each other around the house today, created games jumping off of the time-out chair into a bean bag, Willow grabbed the back of Judah's shirt as he ran away laughing, they crashed into one another on the floor still laughing.. at one point Willow ran up to Judah and said, "best friend!!" and gave him a big hug. They were hugging & both smiling. Even after Sebastian got home they were still playing. Sebastian sat & watched.. I was surprised he wasn't trying to join in.

Judah had a big poop. He requested a diaper early afternoon, wore it the rest of the day, went pee in the bathroom & never in the diaper & finally pooped at the end of the day. His communication has been astounding, leaps & bounds. In the van he said, "Mommy..." and then more words but I couldn't understand. For him to just say, "Mommy" and try to tell me something as we are just riding along in the van, is really huge, it was surreal to me. And those words will come.. I can see them cooking.

I had a talk with J's regular aide. We are going to try hard to be consistent with meltdown strategies. Use a timer if we can to prepare him for a transition.. if meltdown happens then wait it out until he is calm enough for us to explain what is going on. Picking him up & carrying him away during a meltdown makes things worse - it doesn't give him a chance to understand what is happening & adds to the frustration. Not to mention the fact that it's got to be very upsetting to be picked up and physically removed from a location against your will! So that's a last resort - if there is a safety issue or something along those lines, then yes, we'll have to do that, but otherwise we want to give him that time to calm down & a chance to understand what is happening & a chance for him to tell us what he needs & communicate his thoughts to us.

No stomach pain for me today, thank goodness.

Judah missed fish oil & nebulizer (although I did find a place that may be able to fill that script), missed beta & probiotic. Skin rash med & eye drop not needed. Did the iron-up & b-6. B-12 arrived and will be in his shot tonight.

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