How does you handle holiday family juggling?

Time in CT usually means time with the cousins (or at least two of them)!

There aren’t any cousins on my side but there are 9 all together on Patrick’s side.  My in laws welcomed 9 grandkids over just 5 years! 

Besides hanging out with cousins, we took advantage of the wide selection of hockey equipment found in New England over B-more, visited Kringle and Yankee Candle factories, and ate lots of food.  Can you say monkey bread?

It should also be noted here that we’re thankful for the wonderful guy who got PJ all geared up for hockey.  He was even able to find a helmet to fit his head…even if we did have to pay twice as much. 

Note to shoulder pad manufacturers:  Please make the head opening a little bigger or provide snap openings or something.

Oh, we also took in a CT Whale game.  It’s the most attuned the kids have every been.  The Whale even won!  See Ty’s victory violin? 

He’s been taking his air violin everywhere these days

Unlike our other two, he didn’t respond to cause-effect discipline or intuitively learn anything.  We still have to remind him to eat one bite at a time lest he shovel his entire plate into his mouth and then gag it all up…at every meal.  This fall, I set out on a intense quest to figure this kid out.  I’m an information hog by nature, and I wanted to make sure I knew as much as I could that would possible help us to raise Ty successfully. 

So I read, read, read, and read some more.  In fact, I’m still reading.  I have found some common threads throughout the resources I’ve come across and started to come to terms with re-learning some of our parenting techniques.

Here are some things that Ty’s up against that may or may not be due to being a micropreemie and/or being adopted after 4 other placements.  Either way, they are certainly compounded by those things…

1. ADHD–I have no formal dianosis but we are 99.9% sure that these four letters describe our son.  Lest you be skeptical, I fully agree that this is WAY over diagnosed (don’t get me started), but I fully believe, now that we have a Ty, that this is a bonified brain/neurological disorder.  And Ty has it.
2. Sensory Integration/Processing Disorder (SPD)–My jury’s still out on which of the three types most effects Ty, but he shows the majority of the symptoms in these diagnostic lists.  The more I read about this, the more I can’t imagine not being able to process the world properly or how frutrating it must be and the more I’m convinced this plays into Ty’s struggles.  These symptoms are all common in ADD kids.
3. Explosiveness–I cried after reading the first couple chapters of the The Explosive Child.  So few had nailed our child the way this book had. Okay, I cried during a lot of the books.  It’s just strangely reassuring to know that there are other kids like Ty and/or that other parents have struggled the way we have. 
4. Impulsiveness–Part of the reason cause/effect discipline does not work on Ty is that he’s doing whatever he’s not supposed to be doing long before he processes what the consequences could be.

Here are some hopefully helpful things if you can remotely relate to parenting a child like Ty…

1. Diet–While some physicians may swear there are not food sensitivities outside of physiological allergies, I know a lot of parents who beg to differ.  I’ve heard of kids having behavioral reactions to everything from gluten to rice to corn derivatives.  I wish I knew more about this or how to diagnose it without pure trial and error.  We’ve also started supplementing Ty with fish oil and probiotics.  I didn’t notice a huge difference so the jury’s out on whether we’ll continue once this supply runs out.
2. Connecting the physical to the neurological–The most fascinating books I’ve read are how holes in physical development impact neurological development and learning.  It’s a recurring theme all around me lately.  The infant/toddler play actions most of us take for granted (i.e., crawling, peek-a-boo, bubbles, baths, jumping, sand, etc.) can be detrimental if eliminated or skipped.  The things our brains learn through those types of play lay the ground work for being able to learn and regulated ourselves emotionally.
   Enter Exhibit A.  This is what Ty produced in September.  It represents his attention span as well as his lack of attention to detail.
   We started doing activities out of Growing an In-Sync Child in an attempt to start filling in missing developmental gaps in his foundation.  Two weeks later, he sat down with a similar coloring page and VOILA!  The improvement was not due to wrote lecturing about and practicing of drawing in the lines, but activities like pouring water in the tub across his midline and popping bubbles.
   
3. Explicitness–It’s like having an Amelia Bedelia.  There is no intuition or sense of allegorical language.  Everything is literal.  No, “Cut it out!”  It has to be, “Ty, please do not make siren noises.  Please use words or be quiet.”
4. Physical and eye contact–Not only does physical and eye contact provide a springboard for bonding, it’s required for kids who are ADD or have trouble processing sensory input.  Your child might not be ignoring you, he may actually not hear you if there’s any other kind of noise in the area.  Touching to get his attention and requiring him to look you in the eye insures you are heard and processed.  Of course, if your child is impulsive, it feels like being heard doesn’t seem to matter anyway…
5. Accomodations–I’m starting to be convinced that some kids with ADD and SPD need certain kinds of stimulation like others need sleep.  Ty is one of those kids that needs the feeling of deep joint impact if he has any hope of concentrating or sitting still.  Periodically the kid needs to go flying through the air and land…hard…on the ground.  Seriously we started letting him jump down 4 or 5 steps about five times before preschool and his constant wiggliness during circle has greatly improved.  We had to let go of our rule that jumping like that was unaccpetable due to safety reasons.  We’ve found that Ty needs it more than we need to protect him, and he happens to be like a cat…7 lives and always lands on his feet.  Volume of speech? Still working on that one.  But we have found that he needs an appropriate, QUIET outlet of energy at all times.  Wikki Stix have been a great tool for him.
6. Calm/Relax–I know this particularly relates to kids who have been through trauma but some kids seem to be addicted to adrenaline and other stress hormones.  Apparently coming off of them can feel like falling.  Kids are strangely intuitive enough to sense this and figure out which activities create stress, thus releasing more addictive hormones.  Ty tends to operate at this constant high stress, intense level.  You can watch him visibly struggle when required to do activities that are supposed to be calming.  We are working on helping him to be able to feel comfortable at a relaxed state.

Lest you think by reading this post, that we have Ty figured out and we’re all hunky dory…

When he gets up every morning, I take a deep breath and prepare to enter a battlefield.  I am way Type A if you haven’t figured that out, and he way pushes my buttons.  We’re all exhausted and frustrated (including him), and we all yell way too much.  However, God is gracious everyday and gives us glimpses of this really cute kid with a great imagination and fabulous sense of humor which is why we continue to fight to help him grow into his full potential.  Here’s to his 6th year…

Happy 5th Birthday Ty!

P.S.  Here are some resources I highly recommend…

warm days this fall,

it would almost be a sin

not to do some

leaf jumping.

Did you jump this fall?

On paper, Ty’s almost 5. 

There’s one camp that see him as 5 and expect him to act that way.  They lay out how he should be acting based on his age, find the things he can’t do, and have him practice doing them until he gets them.  I used to fall in that camp.  I guess, on some days, I still do.  It was (and is) driving the Type A in me crazy.  Mostly because it’s a road that does not seem to produce progress…just the feeling of needing to bang your head against a wall.

Honestly, it’s an easy camp in which to set up a tent.  Because Ty is in speech therapy, CC, and preschool with kids his age, it’s easy to compare their skills.

The other camp consistently makes excuses for him because he’s not just “all boy” but he’s a micro-preemie and was adopted only 2 1/2 years ago.  That camp thinks he’s adorable and will eventually just catch up.

That camp seems a little too much like a pity party to me and is all fine and well unless you have to live with him everyday.  Additonally, in some ways, we’ve been expecting him to just catch up for 2 1/2 years now, and, frankly, it’s not working for me.

I’m pretty sure sanity and reality are some camp in between.  I never in a million years thought we’d still be struggling to “figure him out” after 2 1/2 years home.  On the plus side, he has come a long way, and I’ve learned more about reactive attachment disorder, parenting an explosive child, ADHD, sensory integration disorder, and early childhood development than I ever dreamed of.  Honestly, I’d never heard of some of those things before Ty.

I’m still processing all the ideas that you were kind enough to share after this post, but I’m hoping to have something that makes sense to share soon.

But for now, I leave you with this:  Focus on the best way to meet your child’s developmental needs where he is and think not of his biological age.

I’m off to tape my own advice on my dashboard, bathroom mirror, computer desk, and wherever else I frequently find myself.

Oops, almost forgot an adoption update.  Our home study is finished!  That’s high on our Thanksgiving list this year for sure.  We’re hoping to have our dossier on its way to Ethiopia by Christmas.  Stay tuned…

But sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and pay for the pictures, post them on the blog, relegate them to the basement and move on.

Fast foward a couple months.  We’re at a first birthday party.  Patrick and Ty are watching  the little guy open presents.  Ty wants to know if he can have cake. 

Patrick: You can have cake afterwards.

Ty:  Blah, blah, blah.  PJ, Mommy, Mia, Daddy, Uncle Bob, Aunt Beth.  Now can I have cake?

Apparently, he heard, “You can have cake after words.”

<insert more uncontrollable laughter here>.

For our purposes, I’m going to define the key words like this:

Strong-willed: Thrives on conflict.  Has difficulty obeying right away…ever.  Always fights to be “right.”

From a hard place: A child who was abuses/neglected, had a stressful prenatal or birth experience, has had multiple primary caregivers.  These children have deep-seeded insecurities that are often communicated through acting out and whose brains do not process high-level, cause-effect discipline in a way that it modifies their behavior.  In fact, traditional discipline may exacerbate negative behavior.

If you can identify with these terms, what has worked or is working for you?  Books, techniques, websites, forums, therapies? 

Ready, set, comment!

P.S. No one knows why he does those hand motions but he consistently does them at those parts.

I know his face doesn’t say, “Excited.”

But he was.