My child has WHAT?!?!

I would like to introduce a special guest blogger today, Allena! We went to high school together, although don’t think we have ever actually hung out {going to have to change that!}. We started following each others personal blogs while I was preggo with my third {Porter} and her with her first {Trent}, they are one week apart. Her blog is a fave of mine and I couldn’t resist having her share this story with the mamas in Austin….I hope none of our readers has this situation to deal with, but maybe Allena’s story will help if  you do. ~Ashlee

As a first time mother, a lot of things happen that would never happen to your child before you had children.  You do and say a lot of things you swore you never would.  A few weeks ago, my husband and I found ourselves looking at each other and saying we had no clue what to do with our child.  I started to wonder how I so quickly lost control and when did I become a parent who needed Super Nanny’s help!

Before I go too far into our story, let me back up.  Hi!  My name is Allena, I’m married to my high school sweetheart, Brent, and we have a 3 year-old mini-me of my husband, appropriately named Trent.  If you want to learn more about me and our family, check out my blog here.  Trent entered our world, and as any first time parent can attest, life was never the same.  Through trial-and-(lots of) error, we find we are doing the best we can.

Trent is often described as ‘strong willed’, ‘high spirited’, ‘energetic’…you get the picture.  He’s all boy, all the way.  He is rough-and-tumble and has no fears.  We’ve dealt with his physical outbursts since he began having tantrums.  Want proof?  See the giant goose egg below (taken last summer)?  Yeah, from beating his head on our tile floor over the word ‘no’.

He has been a little aggressive from the word ‘go’.  He went through a hair-pulling phase.  He used to hit my niece when she was a baby for no reason.  But at the heart of it all, he is a sweet boy 95% of the time and the light of our lives.

However, we noticed an escalation of the violence around 6 weeks ago.  At the same time, he moved classes at daycare (away from his favorite teacher) AND we cut him off from his pacifier (‘night night’) due to the rules in his new daycare class.  We got almost no notice of the classroom rule (bad job, school) of no pacifiers and decided our best option was to just break the habit cold turkey.  Remember when I said trial-and-error?  Yeah, this was probably one of the errors.  Our lives have been a disaster since.  Escalated hitting, scratching, biting, kicking, pinching…you name it, he’s doing it.  Now, all of the sudden, he’s not sleeping.  2 hours to fall asleep at night, fighting naps to the point of not taking one…it’s gotten ugly in our house y’all.

After a month of this, I decided it was time to take matters into my own hands.  I called my psychiatrist, you know, since Super Nanny wasn’t available.  After Trent was born, I suffered from post-partum anxiety (which I didn’t even know existed pre-baby) and have loved my doctor ever since he brought me back from that dark, dark place.  I hope to be able to share that story of recovery with y’all one day!  When I met with him to discuss Trent, I laid out all our issues rapid fire.  I fully expected him to give me some ideas of things to try to help with the discipline and sleep issues.  What I did not expect to hear was that my son was exhibiting ‘classic signs’ of ADD.  Now Trent has never been seen by my doctor and 3 is too young to truly diagnose someone with ADD, but WHAAA?  Color me shocked.  I took a minute (okay a week) to process and moved into solution phase – Okay, so now you tell me this, but what should I do?  His suggestions included
(1) A few tweaks to the way we handle his strong-willed behavior which included providing him 3 chances to do something, like stay in bed, before we discipline and really talking up how he must use self-control.  This is a new catch phrase in our house.  “You have to control your hands to not hit Mommy.”  “I will let you go when you can control your feet and not kick.”  Good times.
(2) Dietary changes – gluten and sugar irritate the brain of ADD kids apparently.  I’m all for this (which I’ll explain below)
(3) Calming drops to help him settle at night.
(4) Limiting ‘video’ time.  Trent LOVES movies (as he calls them), and we try to limit that time, but it’s a challenge when he asks constantly to watch a movie.

All of these ideas sounded reasonable to me.  But I wanted to talk it through with 1 more group of people.  Enter Peoples Pharmacy.  Man oh man, can I tell all you lovely Austin mommies how fortunate we are to have such an amazing group of people with so much knowledge to help us with all our health needs.  Like whoa amazing.

I have since made numerous calls and visits to my favorite location where my homeopath works (the Westlake store).  And yes, she is all mine.  {grin}  I feel like as a typical first time mommy you do a lot of research on strollers, car seats, cribs, daycares, etc.  I felt fully armed with a lot of knowledge about PRODUCTS but little knowledge about HEALTH for my son.  Another ‘error’ on my part.  Did I do what I thought was best?  Yup!  Are there changes I will make next time?  You betcha!  (Oh, and speaking of next time, we’re expecting our second love as a Christmas present for Trent.)  Many of those things come from the amazing knowledge I have gained from my homeopath.  I have learned a lot more about natural health and natural eating that I wish we had done with Trent, and we’ll definitely do with Baby Dos (or as much as the Hubs will let me do as he is much more mainstream than me)!

So a week and a half post initial psychiatry appointment?  We are definitely seeing improvements in his response to our discipline (yay!), we are making some progress on his diet and video time (yay!), but the sleep is still a BIG problem (boo!).  I picked up my second homeopathic supplement this week to try out.  I’m also reading a few parenting books, ‘The Strong Willed Child’ and ‘Parenting with Love and Logic’.  I always feel like there is great support and knowledge in books, and I am a definitely parenting book junkie!

Bottom line: The potential (regardless of how remote) that my child will have to struggle with ANY condition makes me sad as a mom.  You never want your child to have challenges, as unrealistic as that is.  But as a mom, it is things like this that bring out the bear in me.  We will do whatever is necessary to give him the best treatment possible (and as natural as possible) no matter the cost or sacrifice.  We have no clue whether this is a phase, a reaction to the changes in his life, or if he truly will be diagnosed with ADD, but we are up for the challenge…at least until Super Nanny can come over to fix it all for us!  Anybody have her direct line?