"I know you just called me odd"

This week I had to meet with Lily's school based therapist to go over her progress, etc.  At one point the therapist said, "We are clearly dealing with O.D.D (oppositional defiant disorder) here."  Lily looks at her with straight seriousness and goes, "I know you just called me odd."

This leads to today's discussion.  How do you tell your child that they are odd or weird or not good at something without crushing their hopes and dreams? For example, Brady believes he's going to grow up and go to Alabama and be the quarterback.  Now I'm torn here.  I know I'm supposed to nurture his dreams and encourage him to reach for the stars.  However, at the same time I know that this kid has pretty bad attention deficit and does not have the attention and fast thinking skills required to be the QB anywhere, much less Alabama.  How do I get around this problem?  I bought him a book about being a skilled kicker and a kicking tee for Christmas.  So now we are trying to encourage him to gravitate towards being a kicker instead of a QB.  Seems to be working so far.  However, this is just one of many things.  His latest obsession is hockey.  He also wants to be a geologist.  He keeps walking around in the field behind our house and finding crap that he thinks he's going to make money off of.  His list of hopes and dreams changes rapidly.  Never wavering from an Alabama football player though.  The kid is really not good though.  The only part he's good at is running and for some stupid reason the tackle football coaches always put him on the line instead of putting him back as a safety or something like I told them to do.  Brady always got creamed because he doesn't have the reaction time necessary to be on the line in tackle football.

So how do you tell your kid they aren't good at something?  Or do you just never say anything and let them continue to live in ignorance and just maybe figure it out on their own one day?  Maybe I should talk to Honey Boo Boo's mama because whoever told that woman that Honey Boo Boo was good enough to do beauty pageants was doing crack or something.  Crack is whack kids. Don't do drugs. 

Worst. Mother's. Day. Ever.

For today's bad parenting installment, we are going to go back to Mother's Day 2011. What makes it the worst Mother's Day ever you ask? For starters, your husband and children giving you an iTunes gift card as a gift, and it's still wrapped in the grocery bag they got when they bought it. Who wants an iTunes gift card for Mother's Day?  Apparently my family thinks I do.

We had a pretty rough winter and spring that year in the big MO (Missouri) and that Mother's Day was pretty much the first really nice and warm day we had. We decided to go to the park over behind our housing office (military housing). They have a playground and a little splash pad thing over there. We even took the dogs over with us, it was such a pretty day.

So Brian and I are sitting there watching the kids play in the splash pad thing and we watch as Lily goes over to sit down on a concrete bench that is part of a concrete picnic table set up. I watch her put her hands on the bench to push herself up and then boom! The bench part falls off the pedestal part and lands directly on her foot. I don't know how she got her foot out from under the bench but by the time I got to her 5 seconds later, the bench was no longer on her foot. I just see blood coming from her big toe and I figure her toenail was ripped off. I scoop her up, yell for Brian and Brady to come on and I start walking home with a screaming her head off Lily. Halfway home, Brian has caught up with me, I stop (because I'm carrying a kid half my weight) and look down at her foot. Already swollen and black and blue just in those few minutes. I hand her over to Brian, take the dogs from him and tell him to just put her in the car, we're going to the ER.

Being the good parents that we are, we have no idea where Brady is. We just naturally assume he's following us. So we run home, throw the dogs in the house, Lily in the car, me in the driver's seat.....and no Brady in sight. Brian goes to look for him. I can see Brian on the next street over from ours yelling for Brady to come on. Brady had apparently decided he was going to take his sweet time in getting home by going the long way AROUND all the houses instead of cutting through the middle of the houses. Brian is still yelling for Brady to come on. Apparently Brady isn't coming because all of a sudden I see Brian take off in a dead sprint. Few minutes later, I see him carrying a screaming, crying Brady whose (who's?) pants are half down from Brian dragging him. So, not only have our neighbors seen us carrying one screaming kid through the neighborhood, they have now seen us stand there and scream like a banshee at the other kid to come on and then carrying that kid screaming through the neighborhood as well. I'm sure child protective services have been called at this point. (Side note--Brady is screaming and upset because Brian left his scooter down the street where Brady was. Asperger's children are very self centered. It's not a personality trait, it's a part of the disorder. They do not understand correctly human emotions either. His brain could only wrap around himself and his scooter. Not that his sister was in pain.)

So we drive to the local children's hospital ER with 2 soaking wet, screaming children. Again, I'm thinking if our neighbors haven't called CPS yet, the children's hospital is going to. They were nice enough to give both children gowns and warm blankets, and they squirted some Fentanyl up Lily's nose. In just a few minutes she went from screaming her head off to blowing bubbles like a drunk idiot (If I ever break something, someone make sure they squirt some Fentanyl up my nose). Long story short--foot was broken, got it casted the next day. So we leave the ER and head home to try and salvage some of the day since my husband was making me some smoked ribs and chicken on the smoker. Get home and all the smoke alarms in our house are going off. We had left a candle burning and it had started melting the glass. This prompted our switch to Scentsy and we no longer have candles in our house. Needless to say, by this point the only thing left to do is just go to bed....which was impossible because Lily was in pain and the pain meds weren't helping.....

Spying on your children....

So we have lots of problems with Brady sneaking food when he's not supposed to be. He is so bad about it that he is not allowed downstairs unless an adult is down there. His therapist apparently has a bleeding heart because she tells us that we "can't let him go hungry." So I decided I would try it her way for a bit basically so that I could go back to her and tell her how wrong she was and that I would be going back to doing things my way. Real great parent here, huh? So she said when he wakes up at 5 am on a Saturday morning and running around like a banshee screaming "I'm hungry!" to allow him to go get himself something healthy. So Saturday morning and Sunday morning both, he was told he could go downstairs and get an apple off of the kitchen counter to eat. This is mainly in an effort to get him to leave us alone so we can sleep oh for another 3 hours or so....Anyway, both mornings we get up and there is sugar all in the pantry floor. There was no need for him to get in the pantry to get an apple, so he was sneaking in what I can only assume is handfuls of sugar. He said he spilled it while looking for a bagel. Again, he wasn't allowed to get a bagel and secondly, no where near the sugar in the pantry. So this morning I had to get up early (0530) to get ready for work. As I'm walking across the bedroom to the bathroom, I see Brady run down the hall to his bedroom. Last night I had made some little homemade turtle candy things. Brian counted them before we went to bed last night. This morning there were 2 left. Last night there 7. Brady says he did not eat them. He says the dog did it. In his defense, the dog might have. However, the dog would not have left any on the plate. And he would have knocked the plate in the floor. I know the dog. I know my kid. He's pretty much a pathological liar. So being the good parents that we are, we set up a web cam and there is apparently a website where you can set it up and it will record on motion sensor. This is going to be pretty interesting.....and next week I can go to his therapist and tell her to suck it as far as the food thing is concerned. We're going back to my way of, "There are children in 3rd world countries starving. Not you. Suck it up until I get up and that won't be until at least the sun is up." Moral of the story is this: you can spy on your kids for free....with a web cam and a computer. And then tell your kids therapist to suck it. (for the record, I really do like his therapist. I just totally disagree with her on the food thing.)

Unicorns are real!!!!!

So after you read this you will see where my kids get their ADD from. Thoughts are all over the place this morning so it will be all over the place in this post. :) Today's post is all about Lily. I often describe Lily's personality as a hippie, flower-child who floats through life to her own music. She wants to be a peacock trainer when she grows up and believes unicorns are real for goodness sake. She is also very "self-directed" which does not bode well for her in any group type situations such as gymnastics....ballet......school.....When she was younger and I would ask her to do something she didn't want to do, she would say, "No thank you." How can you argue with such good manners? So anyway, Lily has never really done well at school behavior wise because it goes back to Lily is going to do what Lily wants to do and Lord help whoever tells her otherwise. One of her favorite things is to hiss and growl at her teacher. Her teacher apparently feels as though this is not appropriate behavior. The behavioral therapist at school has tried many different strategies to get Lily to cooperate in the class room and also to quit being so defiant. Each strategy will last about 2 days and then they're back to square one. Long story short, we have gotten Lily into some behavioral therapy at the children's hospital here. So Monday we go to Lily's first appointment which is basically the parents telling the therapist what issues Lily has. So we go through an entire 50 minutes talking with her and telling her about Lily's personality, the uncooperative attitude at school, the hissing, growling, not socializing with other children, etc. The therapist then looks at us and goes, "So what are your goals for Lily and therapy?" I looked at her and wanted to say, "Did you just listen to anything I said to you for the last hour? This kid is HISSING and GROWLING at her teacher! What do you think my goals are?" But I didn't say that. Instead I went on to list the goals that I thought were obvious. Another funny thing is that her teacher sent me an email last Friday about how Lily's behavior has been horrible since returning from Christmas break. She asked me to give Lily a "pep talk" before school in the mornings in an effort to help her have a better day. What kind of pep talk to you give to a hisser and growler? So in talking with my friend the other day, whom we will call K, I was mentioning that I would like to find an alternative type school for ADD children that allowed them to work more at their own pace instead of being forced to keep up with the standard schedule. K says, "they have those." I said, "yes but for juvenile deliquents." She said, "Lily is well on her way." Moral of the story is this: if anyone knows how to get a kid to stop hissing and growling, let me know. :) I was thinking of getting a water bottle and spraying her like you would an animal.....

Duct tape diaries.....

So my sons therapist has given me several recommendations of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and ADHD support groups. I've never checked any of them out because I don't really want to go to some group, sit around in a kum-ba-ya circle and go, "Hi. My name's Amy and my kid has (insert whatever)." Not my style. So, I was talking with a friend the other day whom we will call T. I was telling T about my aversion to groups and how I really wanted to be able to just go sit down with a therapist and be all like, I really want to put duct tape over my kids mouth, duct tape kid to a chair, and shove said child in a dark room for like an hour just to get kid to shut up. I would really like to be able to tell a therapist that and have them say something like, "Well, let's see how we can manage those feelings." Instead of saying, "Um.....I need to call CPS ASAP." So my friend T goes, "I know, right!" We then proceeded to discuss her incident that involved a foot chase and wooden spoon. Not gonna say who won that foot chase....Anyway, when you have not one but two children with ADD, it makes trying to get them ready in the mornings quite a nightmare. One kid is singing the National Anthem at the top of his lungs while the other kid is screaming for the singing one to be quiet. I'm screaming for the singing one to be quiet as well which might bite me in the butt one day. Maybe I should record it like Justin Bieber's mom did and we could all become rich and famous. In between the singing there's a lot of, "Put your clothes on. Stop singing. Put your clothes on. Stop singing. Put your clothes on. Stop singing. PUT YOUR MOTHER F*&%!N CLOTHES ON! (not really on that one. I want to say that one but again, not good parenting. Just like duct taping their mouth shut isn't good parenting either. I don't know who made those rules....) Moral of my story is that if anyone out there knows a good therapist, let me know. :)