March 2010

I can't believe it's almost halfway through March. I am embarassed to say that we have totally neglected NR work for weeks. There has been so much going on and constant changes to our schedule. S is nevertheless making progress. She is talking up a storm and it's so much fun to hear her. She asks amazing questions, but I noticed she does not talk much about feelings, only things and concepts. We just got back from a trip where we had to fly to get there. We hadn't been on an airplane since September, so I knew there would be anxiety. The first flight was only a little over an hour, and she buried her head in my neck the whole way. The next flight was 4 hours and she was just fine. We stayed with friends who have a daughter her age. They played and played and talked and had so much fun. Our 3rd and last day, all of the activity and changes took their toll, and her anxiety increased. When she is anxious, she gets very repetitive with her speech. When she is scared, she'll repeat what I have said to her to keep her calm. She goes through the sequence, "It's okay, it's okay, I'll keep you safe, I'll protect you" and she'll say it over and over. If it's something brief or stationary that scares her, and I tell her it's gone, she'll repeat, "It's gone, it's gone" It's frustrating for me to hear her repeating the same thing over and over again, but I know it's comforting for her. I hate that she has so much anxiety. The good thing is that she can and has conquered so much of it already. At gymnastics class, she now will attempt everything there. She crawled through a tunnel without hesitation last week and this week. Way back in the days of OT, it took almost an hour to get her to peek her head into the entrance of a tunnel. I don't think she ever went all the way through in all of our time there. I'm encouraged that time will work all of this out. Repeated, safe exposures to the scary situations and objects will eventually have her feeling safe. Unfortunately, I'm not sure she's ready for a preschool environment. My other kids were very shy, and I found well meaning teachers to be very cold in their approach and thought that thrusting them into a situation would make them not shy anymore. It just made them not trust their teacher and be scared to death of the next moment that their teacher would do that again. No school situation should have the child living in fear and anticipation of the next anxietly provoking moment. I lived most of my school years with that anxiety. The fear of being called on was the worst. I would have so much anxiety the entire class with a teacher that I knew called on people randomly. I'm betting those were not my best subjects. My one wish would be for teachers to respect where they don't understand. I think you have to live through something to understand it completely, but if you haven't lived it, try to trust that the parent really knows their child better than you do. Yes, you can see how kids manipulate their parents and want to show them you won't put up with that. I just wish it were possible to see each kid for who they are instead of throwing them into a category. That's the biggest issue with getting S the help she needs. I was told by someone in the school system that they would have force fed S. Their big concern was that she was way behind because she had no self feeding skills. It's not that she couldn't hold a untensil and bring it to her mouth, she just couldn't tolerate what was on the utensil. I felt like my words meant nothing. I can still hear how they were telling me that they could offer so much more(their words) and that they had decided I was an incompetent parent who couldn't even teach my child how to eat(my words)! Okay, I got off on a big tangent. I plan to make a schedule for our NR and hopefully have a good report in a week. We need to start fetals, so I'm a little nervous.