You would think that I know the answer to this question. After all I am a trained special education teacher. That is what I spent four years in school for, so that I could recognize and teach a child with a learning disability. So why is it then that I can’t come to a decision about my own child. I spend 24 hours a day with him, minus the 5 hours a week he is in school. But yet I still am up in the air about getting him evaluated for ADHD. There are a lot of reasons for this.

Number one reason is the fact that we have not made a decision about homeschooling yet. If he is going to be home with me instead of in a traditional school setting then what is the point of getting him evaluated. I know how to handle him, how to work with him without a diagnosis. I worry that getting a diagnosis will just be a label that will follow him the rest of his life. If he is home with me I can work with him in a way that suites his needs and learning style, ADHD or not. I don’t need a diagnosis to teach him.

Another reason is the medication issue. I am very reluctant to put him on medication. He is already on so much for his allergies and he has such a sensitive stomach to begin with. I don’t want to add yet another chemical to his poor little body. In fact we are in the process of trying to get rid of as many chemicals in the house as we can. Why would I pourposly add more. I know we don’t have to put him on medication if we don’t want to, but the schools most often push for it, and I don’t want him to be thought of as the bad child in the class, just because I don’t want him on medication. My fear is that he will get a teacher who can’t see past the words unmedicated and ADHD. If I decide to keep him out of school to avoid this situation then we are right back at point number 1.

As Alex get older I have been noticing that he is showing less and less ADHD tendencies. He is still a very active little boy who rarely sits still for a minute. But that does not mean he has ADHD. The impulsive behavior  has drastically reduced. He still touches a lot of things without thinking before he does it, which often gets him in trouble. But he doesn’t have the more severe impulse control problems. He doesn’t run into the street, he doesn’t hit, and he doesn’t often act first, think later. He does have some temper control problems still, but again he is an active little boy. I also feel that he doesn’t have a large attention problem. When he wants to he can spend hours focusing on one thing. He does still have a tendency to jump from one activity to another during free time, but that is getting less and less as he gets older. I am really starting to feel like he is growing out of many of the ADHD behaviors, and what I really have is an active boy. And is there really anything wrong with that. I don’t think so.

So what is the problem you say. School is the problem. Every Tuesday and Thursday I worry about the report that I get from his teachers. It seems like every day is something else. The biggest one is that he has trouble sharing and trouble getting over problems. I am really starting to wonder if this is more a problem with the teachers than with him. He has the same issues here at home and with friends, but for the most part I have been able to work through those with him. In fact the last play-date we were on, I don’t really remember having a problem with him at all. Other than trying to drag him out of there. So once again that brings us back to the homeschooling.  Is he just one of those kids who does better at home? Am I capable of providing the right learning environment for him? Will we want to strangle each other at the end of each day? At the moment I don’t have answers to any of these questions.

As of today we are still planning on sending him to his last year of preschool, and Lizzie will be starting the 2 year old program in the fall as well. I think we will have to see what the next year brings.

So, I have heard so many people tell me over the last two years that there is no difference between girls and boys other than what you teach them.

I am hear to tell you that in my opinion that is totally wrong!!!!

Now that I have one of each I can tell you that they are so different. Even when you count in the fact that Lizzie is a little bit of a tomboy. Alex is constant source of motion and energy. I am telling you the boy never sits still for even a second. He has always liked your typical boy things. Trucks, balls, running, vidoe games, sports, I could go on and on. The first spring we lived in our current house Alex was just over two. We hadn’t replaced the gutters yet and they leaked over the side and made some nice muddy patches in our back yard. Getting home from the grocery store one day, Alex wanted to play in the back yard, since it was a nice day and I had groceries and an infant to carry into the house I let him play in the backyard until I got everything in the house. Took me no more than 5 minutes to get the van unloaded. I go in the backyard to get him for lunch, you guessed it covered head to toe in mud. Lizzie is that age now and it would never occur to her to play in the mud. She fell down on the ice today and wanted to get new stockings on since they had a tiny wet spot on them. I never taught Alex to play in the mud, and I never taught Lizzie not to. That is just who they are. I have never seen it more clearly than one afternoon about two weeks ago.

Lizzie’s baby doll stroller broke so I bought a new one. I decided to get two, one she could keep in the house and one to keep in the car for our Thursday mall walking. Both had to be assembled so I did that during rest time that day. When both kids got up from rest they both wanted to play with the strollers. Lizzie being the little mommy that she is, found her favorite baby, a bag with some pretend bottles in it and was camly pushing the stroller around our living room, dining room, and kitchen. Alex on the other hand had no baby in his stroller, no he wasn’t pushing a stroller he was pushing a race car at high speed through our entire house. Esentially the same toy played with in two different ways.

When we go to a friends house who has all boys, Lizzie finds the closest thing to a doll and carries that around, and looks for peoples purses and shoes. She ignores the light sabers, swords, etc.. If Alex plays with friends who are girls, he finds toy brushes and makes them into guns or swords. Play carrots become a Wii Remote. That is just the way they are. Jason and I certainly don’t encourage them to play with only boy toys or girl toys. We let them play with whatever they want, however they want.

So I am sitting here listening to Alex play his new Wii game, looking out at our beautiful back yard filled with snow and feeling guilty because I really should be doing the many things that need to get done today, number one being laundry. I realized this morning that it has been a while since I posted anything other than my weekly menu plan. So I thought it was time for an update. For the one person besides my lovely husband who reads this, keep any eye out, I have many things running around in my head that I am planning to post about in the next few days.

So here we are at the end of January already. I can’t believe how fast the month has gone by. It seems like just yesterday that the kids were racing out of their rooms on Christmas morning to see what was waiting for them. Both the kids are getting so big. I am now officially the mother of a preschooler and a toddler. No more babies in this house. Jason is probably doing a cheer as he reads that statement. It is hard to believe but in less than a week Alex will be 4 years old. How did I get a 4 year old? He is turning into such a big boy. He is now in school two days a week and loving every minute of it. He attends a sports class once a week and thinks he is such hot stuff when he shows us what he learned during class. As I type this he is playing a new game that he got for his birthday and it amazes me how well he can play the Wii. Not all games, he still has some trouble with some of the harder games like Mario and Star Wars, but over all he has picked it up pretty fast. I am still deciding on whether or not to home school, I change my mind every day. Fortunately I have a whole year before I have to really make a decision. For now he is enjoying school and we plan on sending him again next year. The last “Toddler” milestone we have to get past with Alex is the potty training. He is 95% there. On the days that he is home with me he is in underwear all day except during rest time and bedtime. Now I just need to get him to the point where he is dry and clean at school as well. We are a long way from where we were 6 months ago. If you had asked me 6 months ago if we would be at this point, I would probably have laughed. So who knows where we will be 6 months from now, maybe I won’t be changing any diapers. Hey one can dream right.

Lizzie, how do I describe Lizzie. Lizzie is unique. It is fun and frustrating to watch her grow and change every day. In a little over a month she will be 2. Again how did that happen, my baby is 2!!! While the past two years have gone by amazingly fast, they were also the longest days that I can remember. Lizzie was not an easy baby, and I doubt that toddler-hood is going to be any easier. When James Dobson wrote about Strong Willed children I often wonder what he would do with Lizzie. Jason calls her Iron willed. She knows what she wants and will stop at nothing to get what she wants. She is rough and tumble and loves to dig in the dirt, but at the same time is a beautiful princess. She loves shoes. Any shoe, any size, any shape. She can’t stand it when she doesn’t have something on her feet. She has princess slippers that she wears when she is in PJ’s and will only wait just long enough to have pants or stockings on before she will be reaching for the shoes she wants to wear that day. Once they are on they only come off for nap time and bath time. When we have lunch at Chick-Fil-A once a week, I often find her in the playroom trying to put everybody’s shoes on. Lizzie has two goals in life right now, go to school like her big brother and annoy her brother as much as humanly possible. She will be going to the schools Mom’s morning out program next year, and she can’t wait. I have to drag her out of there every day when we drop Alex off. For now she and I spend quality time running errands on Tuesdays and walking the mall on Thursdays.She is such a joy to watch as she grows and learns every day. She has started really talking and you can almost have a whole conversation with her. Yesterday we were at Target and she felt the need to let the whole store know that “MY DADDY WORK” over and over again. A few months ago she barley said anything, let alone a whole sentence.

As for me, this is a busy time of year for me. I am involved in two bible studies this year, not sure what I was thinking, but I am really looking forward to it. It is giving me a chance to not only grow and learn in God’s word, but I am also getting an opportunity to get to know the women in our new church better. The other study I am taking is through our old church FAC. A good friend of mine is teaching. I am really looking forward to both studies. I am about to start my last semester of Mom’s Time out. In fact it was supposed to start today, but we were snowed out. That is a little bitter sweet. I have really felt like my season for MTO is over. There were many times in the last few years where I depended on that ministry to keep me sane. But it seems that it is no longer necessary and I have felt more and more that I needed to give up my spot to someone who needed it more than I do. I truly believe that I would not have made it through Lizzie’s first year without the support of many people, MTO being a big one. But seasons change and I am moving on to a new and exciting one in my life.

That is where we are at. Busy but loving every minute of it.

God Bless

Heather

Last year, for my birthday my wonderful husband stood in line at the Nintendo store in NY early in the morning to get me a Wii. And yes I mean me. I wanted it to exercise on, and yes I have used it for just that purpose. Although I will say that the last few months I have been a little lazy in that area. I don’t like getting up early and that is the only time that I can get any exercising in during the course of the day. Especially if I do it on the Wii.

Anyway, I digress. In the last year we have also been using it to play games with the kids. They love watching Jason and I play “Super Mario Galaxy,” “Mario Kart,” and Star Wars, among other games. Alex loves it so much that he wants to have a Super Mario Birthday party in February when he turns 4. Notice that I said they love to watch Jason and I play. We have never let either of the kids actually play the games. They have just been too young and not coordinated enough and they, especially Alex, didn’t have the attention span to sit long enough to learn how to play. Occasionally if one of the remotes didn’t have any batteries or we had an empty steering wheel we would let Alex pretend to play and he never knew the difference.

In the last few weeks that has all changed. Alex has started to understand that he is not actually controlling anything that is happening on the screen, and he has asked many, many times to play. He had been to a friends house a few times and watched him play his Game Cube and was starting to catch on. So with Christmas coming up we decided that it was time to find him a game that he could play with little or no assistance from us adults.  We have always been hesitant to get the game systems that are geared for preschoolers. They have such a limited life span and we already had a Wii. I didn’t really want to spend the extra money on a completely new game system, when we already had nice system at home. So we decide to try to fine a Wii game that Alex could play. This is where I ran into some problems. Nintendo has several games intended for children as young as four, unfortunately all of them except one are geared for girls. There was a Dora game, a Disney Princess game and a Barbi game. As I am looking for a game I was starting to get a little discouraged, I needed a game for a young boy. Well we finally found one.

“Go Diego Go, The Great Dinosaur Rescue” This is a brand new game, it was just released at the end of October. The few reviews I had been able to find were good and since it was all we were able to fine we decide to give it a shot. I love it!!! We have had the game for two days now and Alex can play almost completely independently. He does need a helping hand now and then, mostly because he is impatient and tends to go to fast. When you are playing the game in the dinosaur rescue mode there are hints at the bottom of the screen that help the child figure out what they are supposed to do. The hints are little circles with a little person in it showing the child how to perform the action needed at that time and if the child needs to push a button on the remote there is a picture of that button at the bottom of the screen. You can also enable a feature called the helper feature. During certain times in the game at the bottom of the screen a circle with two people in it show the helper that they can use a second remote to help the child complete the action faster.

Alex loves the game, and it is a pretty active game. So he is not just sitting on his bottom playing a video game. He has to jump, dig, and swing, among many other actions. As with the computer we limit the time he is allowed to play, he is still only 3 after all. I don’t want him spending all day infront of the Wii, but all in all I am loving the game, and I am sure our next purchase will be a game for Lizzie, since she can’t stand to be left out of anything.

I am so very tired of being the crazy mom when I attend things with the kids. I never thought that my views on raising children were so out there. I always thought I was working off of the basis that common sense is the way to go. If my kids throw up when I give them milk, then I stop giving them milk, If my kids are not sleeping well, the I find out why and fix it. If I don’t like toys strewn all over my house, then the toys stay in the playroom ,It didn’t seem so out there, until recently.

I have been taking Alex to a sports class at a gym near us since last summer. He loves it and the day and time have been working out well for us, so we stayed with that class this fall. Well, the group of kids changed and with it so did the mothers. I try to talk to these mothers and I come off like the crazy person in the room. I mentioned that Lizzie has been taking these short 30 to 40 minute naps every day instead of her usual 2 hours, but that she is now finally mostly sleeping through the night. I got told that I shouldn’t stand for that short of a nap, and you can only imagine the look I got when I told her that my three year old doesn’t nap anymore at all. The napping brought on the issue of sleeping at night, another mother mentioned that they think her son has sleep apnea, so I mentioned that we are looking into that for Alex as well, to see if that is causing some of his hyperactivity. They never mentioned getting the adenoids x-rayed (which is the first thing our Allergist wanted to do) so I asked if they had done that. Again with the crazy women looks. I know for a fact that you can’t see the adenoids without an x-ray, and the adenoids are a big cause of sleep apnea, so why is that so crazy. Last week everyone was talking about Christmas presents and toys and how the toys are taking over the house. I mentioned that we just got rid of a bunch of toys for those reasons, they were taking over the playroom. This led to the fact that we don’t really allow toys out of the playroom, here come the crazy lady looks again.

Not only am I the crazy lady, but I can never finish a sentence. The minute I start talking I get interrupted. I talk about the kids food issues, I get told how they are not nearly as bad a someone else. I change Lizzie’s diaper and I get looks because I use cloth. Why is it that many mothers think that the way they are doing something is the best, and if anybody does it differently then they are the crazy lady. I am so tired of being that mother. Yes if my two year old is lying on the floor throwing a tantrum because I won’t let her do something, the I am just going to let her cry, it won’t hurt her and she needs to learn she can’t always get her way. If that said two year old is tired and behaves better if I put a movie on for her while her brother is in gym, what is the harm in that. It helps her get the rest she needs and allows me to watch my son during class. Why is it so crazy.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that, while I love my children dearly, I don’t cater to them. They need to learn to do things for themselves and how to get along in the world. Yes they are young and still need me to do a lot for them, but it is never to early to learn. So many parents these days cater to their children and then wonder why they are still living at home at the age of 30. I guess I will go on being the crazy mom and I will have to learn to live with it, I think I am going to start taking a book to the gym with me.