Originally uploaded by CleverGirlBek
my glasses? or my little hairclips?
(I was tired and realized that the missing glasses were on my head when I found a 3rd pair and tried to stick them on top….)
Posts Tagged ‘add’
Best invention ever…
July 3, 2008
Originally uploaded by CleverGirlBek
I never thought of myself as the sort to wear earplugs. I am the sentry of our home… I am the one who is always on alert, ears cocked for the slightest sound because the boys are pretty oblivious for the most part…
A couple of months ago we started using a dawning alarm clock (a BioBrite one) and the seller sent me a pack of ear plugs with the clock.
Because we have frequent and sudden foul weather here (and multiple tornadoes in the past couple of weeks) I would only wear one ear plug- in the ear facing “up” (I am a side sleeper) so I could drown out hubby’s snoring and obnoxiously loud breathing and maybe grab some zzzzz’s without being woken up by his nightly cocophany. That worked well as I could still hear enough with the unplugged, yet dampened by my pillow, ear so I could hear boyo through the baby monitor. But then I’d flip over and the breathing/snoring/senile moaning would have me wide awake again…
So I did some research and found The Earplug Superstore. Oh yes. Thank you oh wonderous world wide web!
While they do have excellent descriptions of all of their plugs I figured I’d try a sampling of foam plugs, like the freebies I got with that clock… So I ordered their “softest and smallest” sampler… A huge selection of fascinating colors and earplug marketing strategies… I’m not kidding. I have a pair of NASCAR “sparkplug” earplugs and another pair of Camo Plugs! Craziness!
Anyway, I also decided to try a higher end pair of earplugs…. I ordered the “SleepSoft” plugs made by Alpine. They promise a dampening of ambient noise but still allow one to hear the doorbell and children calling… They have open “ducts” to prevent “pressure” differences and they keep one from feeling cutoff.
Well, they arrived and are a miracle. It was mid afternoon when the package arrived and the grass was being chopped outside…. I went into boy’s room where he was playing music and I put in the plugs and had him speak to me… I could hear him clearly (but slightly dampened/quieter) but I could no longer hear the lawnmower or clothes dryer.
If these weren’t so durable I would have ordered the 6 pack! They are very comfortable and come with a little stick/applicator thingy as they are so flexible that you won’t get a great fit just using your fingers. They do come in a handy slider pack/container for safe and clean storage…
As far as using earplugs for ADD/ADHD, I am planning on using my giant sampler pack on the weekends when hubby is typically in charge of boy while I rush to get everything done and in some sort of order. I am so easily distractible by the slightest sound. One of my ADHD/ADD books recommended using noise cancelling ear phones but ear phones are out in our home as boyo would obsess and freak out if he didn’t get to use them and there goes any peace and quiet… So for now, for a couple of hours on Saturday morning, I will be escaping to my quiet little place to focus and maybe finish something for a change. Obviously, I would not wear earplugs while home alone with the kiddo…No way. Too risky, even if I can still hear him a little bit…Also that would be insanely rude and I try not to roll that way…
Anyway, I’m testing my “portable isolation booth” (ha ha) tomorrow morning…. Hopefully, this will increase my productivity and focus in general, so that I can finish the things that require intense focus, and have more time to spend with the boys…
I’ll update soon…
Ch-ch-ch-changes…
June 26, 2008Lots of changes happening in our little world right now…
thankfully baldguy has been asked to stay at his job for a couple more weeks to help transition one of the clients so that worry can get pushed away for more immediate concerns and changes…
Boy just does not transition well…The kid needs consistency…Yesterday I found out his teacher had been let go. The two aides/teachers who work in his classroom are wonderful, but they are very different. Over the past year I have been able to tell when his head teacher was out for the day by his behavior and attitude at home afterwards. Transitions like this set him back so far. We try to prepare and help him, but in this case he was told his beloved teacher was out on vacation last week… and Boy is home sick so far this week so I don’t even know if they have left a note in our box. So there was no warning…No ability to help him transition by saying “see you later”… This could set him back months. Gahhhhhhhh!
and he’s sick. Kid on cough syrup (and they did not have any dye free cough syrup at walgreens yesterday) with a hefty dose of red dye #40. No wonder my hair is falling out in handfulls this week. He is crazed. He is the kind of crazed that you see on Cops and zombie movies- hyper and lashing out, mumbling incoherently, shouting nonsense, utterly pantsless. We see his ADHD most of the time and we have adjusted and it is only some of the time that he doesn’t self-sooth these days, but this week has been like living with an angry, illogical, drug addled strung out little man. He is usually our family safety officer. He will often request backup if I am plugging something in (because you always need to have a grown up buddy when doing things like that) and has frequently declared that plugging anything in must wait until daddy gets home… Yesterday, in his whirlwind he plugged the radio in by himself (during a huge thunderstorm)…This morning he found the one roll of film in our home and unwound it completely…I may completely lose my last marble in the coming weeks…
Anyway. Just home with boy trying to keep him out of trouble. His ADHD in this sick and cough syrup addled state and my ADD (completely and utterly without the H) are extremely incompatible and frustration runs deep in both of us.
Ok. Enough of my babble. He is “watching” a CD on my TV. He likes to watch the numbers count down.
I need to check my to do list and make sure I’m knocking things out….
In the next week or so I will be blogging about some new tools we are and will be implementing into our home to help with our rampant attention deficit issue (all three of us have it…) …
Speaking of which…Boy just hollered at me that we need to dance.
Ok. I’ll be back.
Hugs.
b
No mess and low stress….Kid-made card idea…
June 6, 2008
Originally uploaded by CleverGirlBek
Here’s a recipe for frustration:
ADD/ADHD kid + ADD/ADHD mama + craft supplies + desperate need for child-made greeting card
Ok, so he drew a perfect tulip at age 16 months. Before he could walk.
He couldn’t walk until 22 months so most of the really shockingly advanced stuff happened before that momentous occasion.
Still, I like to give the various grandparent’s handmade cards….
But my kiddo who has some language, neuro, and sensory stuff going on along with ADHD has a hard time sitting still and following even very general (or specific, trust me, I have tried everything) directions usually will just wind up with a giant table full of glue (see glue tip below!) and no cards will be made… I found that the easiest way to make anything with him is to do it in 5-10 minute increments… I do realize this is not teaching him to sit still and focus for very long, but at this stage of the game we are working with smaller goals (and we don’t always reach those smaller goals, so they aren’t “too small” ….they are just right…). He also tends to only see everything as a finite whole. So this is teaching him steps and details…
Anyway, I sat him down with a marker and a stack of blank cards (by the way, if you think you are going to make a slew of kid cards, why not buy a giant box from http://www.doubleupaper.com ? They are fast and the prices are great…For the price of 6 envelope and card packs from a chain craft supply you can have over 200 sets…I keep a case in my famed plastic containers- so they stay fresh and don’t absorb any smells (my husband makes tacos once a week. I love tacos but I still want to hermetically seal everything in our home first.))
See what I mean about ADD? I need mapquest for all of my tangents…Not that it would be *that* much help… :-)
Anyway, I sat him down and had him make smiles or a “c” or “u” on each card.
He did about 10 of these before he went to town making dots and destroying the magic marker tip….
He got up and ran around for a bit and then was willing to sit down for a few to do some more… I busted out the self-adhesive googly eyes and had him put eyes on the “faces”…. He did 15 of those (good for fine motor skills and dexterity, I believe)…
The next time he sat down he drew the mouths/smiles on the extra 5….
15 cards in no time flat (if you tally all of the time together and subtract the breaks)…
and nobody became frustrated, and both of us has a huge sense of accomplishment at the end of the project…
(and the grownups loved the cards… it must have been a nice change of pace for them to be able to say “wow a smiley face” rather than wracking their brains having to figure out what kiddo had drawn as he is king of the abstract these days…)
Not really type-A at all….But I have to be… For the boy….
May 2, 2008
Originally uploaded by CleverGirlBek
This is our magnet board. I am not a neat freak. I’m nowhere near organized. I am struggling with this, but it is helping…. *phew*
The magnets were made by me using the Make-a-Schedule software from Do2Learn.com ….
We use the magnet board to lay out boyo’s every task for the day… As he does the various things he gets to put the magnet in a little container (like a piggy bank)… At the end of the day we count them up and they count as points to be used for things on the “menu” of treats…
Right now it is broken down in a fairly detailed fashion but as he masters certain tasks that contain multiple steps they will be truncated to focus on other areas…
The Prize Menu comes from conversations with kiddo, so they really mean something to him…
He loves going to the big car wash (actually, it’s the same size as the other car washes, but that’s what he calls it…) so for 200 points he gets to go to the carwash with us… Or for 200 points we can go out for ice cream on the weekend… 200 points can also be watching a DVD movie with baldguy and me…
The magnet board/scheduling like this is not easy. Right now it and helping boy with the tasks on it are all consuming. I’m exhausted and burnt out but boyo is doing great. This is helping in a huge way with transitions- it’s like he can fight with us and totally lose his marbles, but the pictograms are irrefutable….
We are still working out the kinks… And eventually will have a more variable point system, but starting with the basics works best for us… So here we are…
Oh and the do2learn.com software is wonderful- the desktop version requires a bunch of downloads to get all of the images onto your computer (so you can use the software without a live internet connection- I do most scheduling during boyo’s therapy and they do not have wifi in that building so using it off-line is important to me… If you do order the desktop version make sure you scroll down on the get images menu- there is a “get all” option at the end- you don’t have to be a dolt like me and click them all and wait one by one… Ugh. need more sleep…)
Maybe I should put my sleep on the schedule…. :-)
Argh.
May 2, 2008
Originally uploaded by CleverGirlBek
In a recent raffle, baldguy won tickets to Pieces of Eight- a fun Pirate ship excursion into the Gulf of Mexico… They are currently repositioning to service the keys…I do recommend it- it’s a freaking awesome pirate ship with modern amenities and a rockin’ band of pirates. Fun was had by all!
It was so nice to be disconnected from the world for a bit, out on the boat… Here’s a picture of boy on the boat. He doesn’t understand that a costume or a painted on mustache are just pretend- he thinks they actually transform him into another person.
I was amazed that he let them draw a mustache on him.
After around 5 minutes he furiously tried to wipe it off and had a running in place moment of freaking out when he declared
“Just me. I want to be just me. No pirate me. Just ME.”
It was huge though- he went on a boat, he tried something new at lunch, he had his face painted, he took pictures, he wore a hat and a pirate hat, and there was a brief moment where he donned an eyepatch.
Awesome.
Labelmaker
March 12, 2008
Originally uploaded by CleverGirlBek
Ok. So I was talking to someone yesterday and I was explaining the steps I have been taking, or attempting to take, in reorganizing the household so there are less distractions to send boy and me into our personal ADD spirals…. So my side of the conversation went something like this:
“I bought small plastic containers”
“They stack”
“I bought a bunch of them. Everytime I go to the store they have more in the same color. I’m not even a big green person- more into blue, which they had…Anyway. I bought a bunch”
“And I bought a label maker”
“This project has been going on for a month. I have a tower of plastic containers with green latches in my living room. I’m going to put everything in plastic containers and label it so it’s out of sight but I can still find stuff” (note: true to a life of ADD and being the creative sort I tend to leave things out because for me, out of sight=out of mind and leaving things out typically means I do eventually finish them but it also means that we have tons of visual clutter which would be distracting for a person without ADD/ADHD….Hence the reorganization)
At this point I confess the following.
“The label maker is put away. I made a label for it that says ‘LABEL MAKER’.”
And it is at that point that we both start laughing, hard.
The truth is that I have been having a hard time with my ADD and fatigue and a whole host of health issues…
And of course, boyo comes first- always. So now I’m staring at a pile of information about how to help him, how to help me help him, how to help the teacher help him, how to explain all of this stuff to his grandparents, and a sizable pile of how to help me. Because if I can’t focus at all, I can’t very well help him.
So today I went in and dug around and found some more suggestions on being a productive adult with ADD.
Those of you that know me, know that I work my arse off and I always have and I always will, it’s my nature. I do, in fact, get things done.
But what I cannot do is focus. Have a conversation with me in person and you will find that my brain likes to take detours. Trying to complete a task as simple as getting a cup of coffee in the morning can often turn into a 2 hour event, if it happens at all. Most folks have blinders that they don’t even think about- that ability to get out of bed and get the cup of coffee. They can tune out the things that derail me in my attempt at having just a regular morning. Everything has a million steps and points at which I can be pulled off of my track. I do many things exactly when they occur to me and it takes every bit of strength not to be derailed from one tiny task, and then I’m wiped out if it gets done at all…I’ve had other artists ask to come hang out- to have fun and to learn from each other, I’d love that, but I can’t function with more distraction, and I’m a little shy about my visual clutter and my mad scientist work style… I did function, for years, in office situations. Surprisingly, many of my jobs in the past have involved organizing other folks. But that was before the many things that make my ADD more symptomatic… I do manage to get my orders out on time, but instead of completing them in one simple swoop I have been finding that having more of a schedule/to do list of every part is necessary and while it only takes me a few minutes to get an order out (ready to wear pieces) those few minutes are quite broken and scattered across the day…
But as long as the label maker box has a label that says label maker on it and the label maker is in the box, then everything will be A-O.K., don’t you think….
(hubby just came back in the room and said “what’s up kid?” and that’s all it takes for me to be knocked off the track….eeeeek. I’ll post this anyway, even though I’m pretty sure it didn’t go where I intended it to….)
*hugs*
b
Update on neuro
March 3, 2008Just a quick and brief update…
Looks like pretty bad ADHD (don’t worry anyone, nobody is jumping the gun and medicating the kiddo. With our family medical history we know better) combined with Sensory Integration Disorder and higher language issues, low tone, and poor fine motor skills. Of course, all of these things play off of each other and everything needs attention…
Working on strategies to work on structure and impulse control….
Doc suggested putting boy-o in the public school system where he will be better supported… I agree that he may need a change in school environment/structure in regards to learning with ADHD and not having it be such a mix of “he sat still and learned today” and “he needs to work on his listening/he doesn’t listen” (which seem to be the two brands of report that I get when I pick him up). Maybe that structure is a trial run of more days at school because it seems like the minute he settles down (in his 3 mornings a week) it’s the weekend again…. I understand that public school might be a better fit and better support and it might be more of a no-brainer if we still lived up north. But we don’t. We live in Florida where corporal punishment (physical paddling…rationing of bathroom use…physical restraint) is permitted according to state given teacher rights and those rights offer too much personal interpretation and gray area for me to be comfortable sending my kiddo into that environment without a ton and a half more research and trying out a few more things before we make that big change. I realize not every teacher paddles or believes it is a positive approach to managing behavior in the classroom, but in our county it is allowed….I have lots of what ifs these days…What if a sub comes in for the day and thinks paddling is the only way to deal with a child who can’t sit still or won’t stop talking a mile a minute and can’t stop disrupting his peers? That one person could do a whole lot of damage to my kid, and I’m not willing to take that risk especially before exhausting all other avenues.
Not deciding anything overnight. Not when it comes to my kiddo.
Especially with this. Especially because I have fairly difficult to manage ADD, and I have been through the medical wringer. I ‘m more than a little wary of doctors and other medical professionals making snap judgements based on one little trait…I’m more than a little exhausted from staying on my toes as far as my reasoning goes and being aware that some things can be helped by medicine and need medicine, but not until all other avenues have been exhausted. In our situation that means creating structure at home and in school and working on the kiddo’s other areas that need improvement….
Updates to come… For now I have a whole bunch of organizing of pretty much every part of our lives. Not easy for as our lives have been pretty much an endless series of “survival” modes since I became pregnant with my little guy long ago. Medical and family and financial and work emergencies have kept us moving, but haven’t helped with taming our environment. So that is what we are working on now, so we can have a cleaner canvas to build upon.
