Category Archives: parenting

Sharing your compliments in writing

parenting

Recently our rabbi and rebbetzin came from the US for a visit, and there was a get together on Saturday evening for former members of their shul to connect with them.  I really, really, really wanted to be there.  But there’s no way to get there from the northern part of the country via public transportation in time, so we (once again – they’ve done this every year) had to pass.  Yes, I felt disappointed and even deprived of something important to me.

But!  My oldest three kids who are in the country all independently decided they wanted to go.  Ds14 spent Shabbos with dd17 so they’d be able to go together, and ds20 met them after Shabbos was over.  I was so happy when I was sent a picture of the three of them with our rabbi.

Then the following day I got a lovely email from someone we haven’t seen since she and her family made aliyah six years ago.  She wrote:

“Your children are AMAZING ambassadors for Mishpachat Werner.
 
I like them all — EACH — so much. I chatted briefly but substantively with each of them, and remembered why “Werner” means the same thing as “excellent midot.”
 
I had the pleasure of spending quality time with (one of them). What a remarkable young man! He has the ability to converse candidly and openly with “old wrinklies,” without coming off in any way as if he doing us a favor. He is truly interested in other people, and able to engage completely with whomever he is speaking. If he had any complaints about walking “miles and miles” to his accommodations, he surely doesn’t share them his hosts or us. And THEY also passed on that they were grateful I sent them such a lovely neshama.
 
Whatever I say isn’t enough. You should just be validated in the knowledge that (we) — who raised good boys — are impressed by the remarkable young people you raised.
 
Please tell them, when you think it appropriate: “Yalla! The Jewish nation needs leaders like you — so keep working toward your tafkid in Klal Yisrael, for the sake of Hashem’s holy project.” I am certain they have a very important role in leading our people — whatever that looks like for each of them.”

I’ve been told many nice things about my kids over the years.  They’re genuinely wonderful human beings and I am very blessed to be their mother.  But as nice as those things I’ve been told have been, I remember very few of the specifics of the majority of the comments as time has gone by.  And so I was especially appreciative not just of the comments but that this lovely woman took the time to put them into writing, giving me an opportunity to look back on them in the future and be reminded of exactly what she said.
That same Shabbos that these kids were in Jerusalem so they could attend the Saturday night gathering, we hosted three seminary girls.  One of them was one of my older girls first friends in the city in which we lived at the time – we met her when she was seven.  It was so beautiful to see the  young lady she’s grown up to be.  I was planning to call her mother to share these thoughts with her, and then got the above email.  Since I appreciated something in writing so much, I decided to write to her instead. It takes about one minute to tell someone verbally something nice and hopefully they’ll remember it but the conversation moves on and you don’t dwell on it.  But you can read and reread a written message as much as you want.

So the moral of the story is, if you have something nice to tell someone, tell them!  And if you can share your special compliments in a way that they can save them to savor for another time, it’s an additional gift.

Avivah

Recognize and value your needs – stop thinking everyone else matters more!

homemaking, parenting, pregnancy

Today I got a call from a young mother, and as soon as I heard her voice, I realized she was working hard to keep herself together.  I was in the middle of cooking for Shabbos so I asked my kids to keep an eye on the things on the stove and in the oven and told them I’d need some time and privacy to speak to her.  Then we started to talk.

She started to cry within a few seconds.  It all spilled out – she’s due to give birth in two days, her doula just cancelled on her which means she’ll have to go to the hospital on her own to give birth since her husband will need to stay home with their two year old.  Her oven isn’t working and the repair man wasn’t going to be arriving until later in the day, leaving her without time to cook for Shabbos.  And her city is having some problem with the water quality so everyone needs to boil all their water or buy it; her husband doesn’t want to spend the money on bottled water so she needed to boil a large quantity of water to last for all of Shabbos.  She’s very pregnant and very stressed and very overwhelmed.

The first thing I said was that the most important thing is to preserve her physical and emotional strength so she can go into labor feeling good.  That means simplify everything as much as possible.   I gave her some practical suggestions of how to cook a simple one pot meal so the oven not working wouldn’t be an issue and so she wouldn’t spend so much effort cooking a variety of dishes she didn’t have energy to prepare.  She was like, really, you can do that?  Really.

Next, the doula.  We talked about options for this; she has a backup doula and can meet her at the hospital.  (She lives in a different city and wouldn’t be able to come to her home on Shabbos to support her in early labor.)  She said her friends had offered to watch their toddler when she went into labor so her husband go with her, but she thought it would be too hard for her child and it would be best if her husband stayed with their little boy.  There’s a lot we moms give up for our kids and often it’s  necessary, but as much as I value doing what we can to give our kids a feeling of security, this wasn’t the right time for that to be the issue of overriding importance.   A laboring mother’s needs take priority.

But of course it’s important for her son to be in a safe and loving environment where he’ll feel good.  We discussed which people in her life her son felt most comfortable with, and she decided on one friend who has a child the same age he’s very friendly and said she’d call as soon as we finished talking to make those arrangements.  

Next – the water situation.  We women put so many demands on ourselves and surprise, surprise, everyone around us assumes that’s okay and they make demands as well.  The problem is even people who care can’t read our insides to realize when we’re overstretching to do all that we’re already doing.  Husbands, especially young husbands like hers, don’t understand what’s involved in being pregnant and taking care of a young child and doing all she was responsible for.  We’ve got to tell them and to do that we have to recognize our needs and feel they’re valuable.  I’m sure he had no idea that his request that she boil the water would cause his wife so much stress.  I suggested she ask for his help – let him know that it’s too much for her (without drama and accusation) and ask him to please take care of it.  Maybe once he has to do it himself he’ll understand the work involved and decide it’s worth spending the money.  Or maybe he’ll boil it all himself.  Either way it will get done.

In all of these cases, the real issue was that she was giving priority to what others wanted and needed from her more than she was recognizing and validating her needs.  Don’t we all do this sometimes?  Or maybe more than sometimes?!

What I offered her was recognition that her needs were legitimate and important, and then helped her find practical solutions to address them.  Inside our own heads we can lose perspective and sometimes things are obvious to someone outside of the situation.  Once we get clarity on what we really need, it’s a lot easier to find solutions that work.

Avivah

The truth about being strong – it’s not always how it seems

miscellaneous, parenting

This week marks a month since I was hit by a car…..it’s been a very intense month.

The first week was physically difficult but that has gotten much better.  Ds4 and I went to the osteopath a couple of weeks ago.  She examined him and found the muscles on one side of his body were knotted throughout the entire side – she had me feel it and even my inexperienced hands could tell what she was talking about.  She said she never sees this in a child other than when there has been an accident of some sort or when there is scoliosis and then it’s only with kids who are much older than him.  She worked on him and told me not to worry, that he won’t have any lasting damage from the accident.  He’s doing great – though when we cross the street he often tells me when we get to the other side that the car waiting at the crosswalk right then almost hit us; that’s his feeling and there’s obviously still anxiety about crossing streets but this is getting less.

Then she worked on me and asked me if I was having headaches and dizziness and if that was something new since the accident.  I told her I was and it was (though I hadn’t paid much attention to it until she asked), and she said from the state of my neck it was impossible that I wouldn’t be.  She had initially said since my body went through so much trauma that she wasn’t going to do any physical manipulations because they are a sort of trauma as well but when it came to my neck, she wasn’t able to release the muscles without manipulating.  She warned me I might have a healing response afterward and she was right; for at least 24 hours I had a horrible non-stop headache.  But thankfully I  haven’t had any headaches and the dizziness has been minimal since then.

However, I’ve started having breathing difficulties that are atypical for me, and I’ve been really tired.  Really, really tired.  Like at 11 in the morning I have to take a nap.  Also not typical for me.  This began the day after the accident.  The regular doctor said there’s no connection but I’m positive there is and here’s in short what I think happened.  The adrenal glands are what handles stress in the body and when they’re weak or stressed, your immune system drops (when this becomes a chronic situation, it’s adrenal fatigue).  My adrenals were needing significant support before the accident and I believe that this level of physical and emotional stress pushed my adrenals beyond their ability to cope, like the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.  Asthma and chronic fatigue syndrome are both direct results of later stage adrenal fatigue.

Fortunately, I began treating my adrenals the week before the accident and and  am continuing to work on this.  Maybe I’ll talk more about the boatload of vitamins I’m taking daily as part of my healing protocol another time.  Healing the adrenals is a long, long process and this sudden worsening of my adrenal symptoms is something that will take much longer to spring back from than the physical injuries alone.  But it’s good to understand what’s happening and I’m optimistic that my adrenals can heal and I’ll get back to myself.

Emotionally it’s been a difficult month.  It was as if my feeling of isolation regarding lack of support through all the difficulties we’ve gone through in the last two years was triggered by this accident and started flooding out at once.  Good thing I was taking so many emotion balancing vitamins!  This hasn’t been a fun process to say the least but it’s a learning process.

Today I was told by an alternative physician who has supported many people through difficult situations through the years, that she’s never seen someone go through so many troubles who remained as calm and positive as I have, and she thinks I’m the bravest person she ever met.  I recently read something by a pediatrician with many years of practice and she wrote that out of all the traumas she’s seen parents go through, the absolute worst suffering she’s ever seen is one of the situations we’ve gone through.

I have a knee jerk reaction to reject statements like these.  I don’t see my life like this; things have felt hard and sometimes overwhelmingly hard, but even at the worst moments it never seemed worse than what many other people go through.  By the time you’re a parent at my stage of life, just about all of us have experienced really serious challenges of some sort and when I hear what others have gone through, I’m so grateful my challenges are what they are and not worse.  I’m fortunate that so many people have confided in me about their difficulties so I don’t have to theorize about this.   I’m not a complainer – or at least I try not to be – and I tend to downplay what life has been like except to say there have been difficulties.  I have so much to be grateful for – my amazing husband and children are at the top of the list – and I don’t want to focus on what hasn’t been good.  But since the accident, part of my healing process is to allow myself to say that yes, we’ve gone through really hard stuff, one hard thing on top of another and another, all piled on top of each other; each one of those things being situations that people seriously struggle with when it’s only one thing.  When I stand back and look at it through someone else’s eyes I do kind of wonder how we’ve managed.

I have a resistance to being told how strong I am.  I know this is always intended in a positive way but sometimes I have a sense it’s almost like implying that things are easy for me to get through because I have amazing coping skills.  No, it’s not easy for me.  I earned whatever coping skills I have through being forced to develop them.  I’m grateful – beyond grateful – that I and my family have gotten through so many tough things without falling apart.  Sometimes I feel conscious of being an emotionally strong person.  But with equal honesty I can admit that often I feel weak and scared and powerless.  In spite of that weakness or maybe because of it, God has been very good to me and He somehow gives me what I need to keep going so I can keep putting one foot in front of the other.

So when this physician today continued and said I seem to have a lot of inner quiet and faith, she touched on the real answer.  I don’t have so much inner calm and I don’t have so much faith, but whatever faith I have enables me to seem as if I have inner calm. 🙂  Obviously I need these constant reminders about Who is really in charge and to let go and trust Him to take care of me or I wouldn’t be getting them; I just have to remember that on a daily basis when things aren’t in crisis mode and then I’ll be in good shape!

Avivah

‘Read with your children, not to them’

homeschooling, parenting

Today is Day 30 of 31 for 21.

Sometimes I read studies that come out and I almost shake my head that something so intuitive had to be scientifically proven.  The one I’m sharing today is like that, but it’s valuable anyway as a reinforcer for all you parents who read with your kids and involve them in the story- in short, you’re doing a really good thing for them!

“Research has found that reading with young children and engaging them can make a positive impact on the child’s future and their family.”  Here’s the synopsis of the study here.

Avivah

Yirmiyahu’s food and supplements

parenting, Trisomy 21

Today is Day 23 of 31 for 21.

 
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A friend recently sent me a link to a blogpost in which someone shared the details of the diet they fed their child with special needs, saying that it reminded her of me.  It was quite similar to our approach to food with Yirmiyahu, so I thought I’d share what we do in the hopes it will be helpful to other parents.  I’ve written about some of these things in the past but others are new so this is the latest.

As a society we tend to disconnect between what we put in our mouths and how we feel, but not only does what we eat affect the functioning of our physical body, it affects the functioning of our minds as well.

I’ll start with his current supplements:

Fermented cod liver oil – this is great for the brain and we give him about a 1/2 teaspoon a day in his bottle, split into two different bottles so the taste won’t be too strong.  This contains vitamin D, vitamin A, DHA and EPA.  I used to give this with butter oil but when he was hospitalized at eight months, he stopped taking his supplements for that period.  When he got home, he was no longer used to the taste of his formula with supplements and rejected them all.  I had to very, very slowly reintroduce them and build up his taste tolerance.  Butter oil just never got added back in.

Probiotics – these build the digestive system and are very important to gut health, which is at the root of all health.  He started getting these when he was four days old – I added it to the milk I expressed when he was still in the NICU.  He’s been getting 9 billion cfu daily but now his wonderfully high quality probiotics have clumped together into a solid chunk thanks to the moisture in the fridge over time.  I have to find a new probiotic to replace what we’ve been using until now.

Nutrivene-D- this is a special multi-vitamin for individuals with T21, and Yirmiyahu gets 1/2 teaspoon daily, split between two bottles.  He’s been getting this since he was two months old.

Folinic acid – this is a more bioavailable form of folic acid and I give therapeutic (ie high) doses of this combined with 5MTHF based on research studies regarding treatment of cerebral folate deficiency, which I believe is the underlying issue responsible for Yirmiyahu’s slow growth rate.  I bought the 5MTHF in capsule form so it’s easy to just open and add to his bottle, but it took me a couple weeks after starting with the 5MTHF to give the folinic acid since they’re tablets and it took me that long to experiment with crushing them.  It turned out it was pretty easy to do and there’s not much of a taste to it.

Colostrum – I give this daily to build his immune system.  In the bottle.  Naturally.  🙂  The best thing about his formula, other than being dairy-free, is it’s a great conduit for supplements!

Digestive enzymes – I’m currently adding in some digestive enzymes that we got in a free sample pack once a day to his bottle and hope to add this to my next vitamin order so I can make it something he gets daily.  I think his body would benefit from more help in utilizing the nutrients in his food.

Zinc – I give this daily via a spray that also has elderberry and echinacea.  He willingly opens his mouth and lets me spray it in – one squirt a day.

Siverbiotics – a teaspoon daily as a natural antibiotic.  This is unfortunately almost finished and since I’m not yet able to make another order, I’m planning to give him olive leaf tincture once this is gone.

Evening primrose oil – when I remember I rub some of this on his skin.  I started this just last week and haven’t yet gotten into a groove with giving it so it’s still irregular.

Homeopathics – I have a really hard time with homeopathics since they aren’t supposed to be given with food nor right after or right before food.  Without being able to tie this to something regular in my schedule, it’s hard for me to remember to give remedies that are supposed to be given several times a day.  So it’s kind of hit or miss.  I most often remember to give Bioplasma cell salts.  I have a couple of homeopathic remedies that are good for when he’s under the weather; R49 Junior is the one I used most last winter and it’s going to be pulled out again this winter as needed.  I have two others in this series but like I said, I’m homeopathically challenged.

Food – this has been challenging for me, since for so many months Yirmiyahu showed minimal interest in food despite my efforts.  Then he got interested but wasn’t eating what I gave him.  I worried a lot about this and it’s been a huge relief to me as he finally is eating solids consistently a few times a day, and all I have to do is prepare the food and spoon it in!

Early on I made the decision to avoid were gluten and casein, because both are difficult to digest and have other issues involved with them.  I did give Yirmiyahu dairy formula when I began supplementing and continued until he was eight months – it took me four months to convince the doctors that he was reacting to the dairy and get a prescription for the specialty non-dairy formula that we currently use.  I’m really glad we did this, especially after I did the reading on cerebral folate deficiency – a milk-free diet combined with supplementation is the treatment.  Even though I wasn’t able to actively treat it until now, at least he didn’t have dairy formula for these last seven months to make things worse.

I’m not yet giving any grains, since they’re so difficult to digest.  When we do, I’ll start with kasha (buckwheat – we eat a lot of this) and quinoa, which aren’t technically grains but they look like they are so I think of them in the same category.

Fruits and vegetables – I recently saw the suggestion to give six vegetables daily and started making his vegetable mixes with more veggies (used to use three or less).  My first mixture was onions, carrots, kohlrabi, apples and zucchini can’t remember the sixth thing but there was something else) – he loved it!  The blends aren’t based on any recipes, just whatever six things I have in the house that seem to go together.  I don’t consider potatoes a vegetable when making this.   I make a potful, then freeze what Yimiyahu won’t eat within a couple of days in containers and defrost them as needed.  Sometimes I add extra virgin olive oil to this mix after it’s cooked.

I also give him small bits of raw fruits like apple, guava, banana,  mango and avocado.

Coconut oil – I try to give him some coconut oil every day.  Since until recently he wasn’t eating solids, I couldn’t mix it into his food.  I added it to his bottles (when they didn’t have cod liver oil added) but recently tried giving it to him on a spoon when it was slightly solidified and he liked this.  Nice to have one less thing to add to the bottle!

Proteins – he eats chicken, turkey, eggs and lentils (I made him some salmon a couple of days ago but his older siblings found it and ate it first:)).  I usually don’t have to make something special for him; he has some of what we’re having.

I feel like I’m forgetting something but I can’t think what it could be, so I guess that’s it!

Avivah

How long does it really take to learn something?

homeschooling, parenting

Today is Day 20 of 31 for 21.


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A few days ago I was at the park and I met a teacher of one of my daughters last year.  She told me she had seen dd13 at a community event a day or two before and she looked wonderful, and then asked how homeschooling was going.

I told her it was great, life feels much more enjoyable and it’s very gratifying to see how much she’s learning in such a short time.  In the six weeks since school officially started, three of those weeks were vacation days because of the holidays.  So in school they’re still reviewing skills based concepts from last year.  Meanwhile, in that same period of time when we also had lots of breaks for the holidays, dd has completed 3/4 of a year of math and is set to finish the next 1/4 in another week.

I said something about how efficient personalized learning can be, and her teacher agreed with me.  Then she told me something that I found stunning.  She teaches English in the upper elementary grades and said that what she teaches the girls could be taught one on one in two weeks.  I asked her to be sure I was understanding correctly: “That’s hard for me to believe.  You’re saying in two weeks you can teach what it would take you a year to teach in school?”  And she corrected me: “No, in two weeks of personal tutoring I can teach what it takes me three years to teach in school!”

I’m telling you, the conversations I have with teachers are the most affirming of homeschooling!

Today a blog reader sent me a TED talk that reminded me of this conversation.

The talk is called The First 20 Hours – How to Learn Anything, and the premise discussed was that learning a skill and being able to be functional takes about 20 hours.  This reminds me of an assertion by John Holt, that he could teach all of elementary math to a motivated middle schooler in a small number of hours.  (It’s been years since I read this book and think it was close to twenty hours but don’t remember specifically – if you know what I’m referring to, please share the specifics in the comments section and I’ll edit the post.)

The speaker outlines four steps for acquiring knowledge, which I thought was valuable :

  1. . Break down the skill to its main components.
  2. Learn enough to self-correct – learn enough that you can practice and correct yourself as you go along.
  3. Remove barriers to practice – eg distractions.
  4. Practice for at least twenty hours – stick with it long enough to see results and don’t allow yourself to get frustrated by feeling stupid.

To me this reinforces my belief that learning doesn’t need to be made intimidatingly difficult or complicated.  Thinking about learning something new in 20 hours takes a lot of fear out of the process and makes learning even more exciting.  My dd13 and ds11 watched this with me, and as soon as it was over, one looked at the other and said, “So what new thing are you going to learn?”  Dd told me she’d like to learn to draw more – my husband sporadically gives her lessons but she’d like something more regular – I did some quick online research and found some great resources for her that I’ll show her in the morning!

Avivah

Choosing to dramatically cut down on therapy

parenting, Trisomy 21

Today is Day 17 of 31 for 21.

 
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Last week I did something really courageous, something I’m so proud of myself for.

I told Yirmiyahu’s new physical therapist that i won’t be coming more often than every six weeks.

Courage comes in all kinds of ways and while this might not seem like a very big deal, it wasn’t easy for me.  I’ve been questioning the value of traditional early intervention therapies for about a year now.  This has been a hard thing to do, since everyone ‘knows’ how good therapies are.  I’ve had to let go of wanting validation from outside sources for my choices and look to myself to act in integrity with what I really believe to be in Yirmiyahu’s best interest, despite the criticisms and hurtful assumptions that may be made about my commitment to him.   You have to pat your own back and sometimes that’s hard when you’re doing something different from everyone else and are worried you’re making a mistake that your child will pay for.

When I began feeling unsure about traditional therapies, it was just my feeling and I didn’t give much credence to that since I thought I must be wrong since therapy is good and therapists are all going to know more and do better than I could.  Then I read an incredibly powerful paradigm shifting book that deserves its own post, Disability is Natural that more than validated my feeling; it got me thinking deeply about disability and how our culture views it, and how do I want to participate in that culture.  This wasn’t something theoretical or exclusive to the philosophical realm.  I found that after therapy I always had an inadequate and negative feeling about myself as a mother and looked at Yirmiyahu’s development with anxiety,  They seemed to be looking for delays and if he wasn’t delayed, rather than say something positive about how well he was doing, the message was instead about how hard we should work so he wouldn’t become delayed.

As I read about the experience of adults with disabilities who spent years in therapy and the negative self-image that developed as a result of absorbing the unspoken message that there was something inherently wrong with them, I thought how difficult these messages are to combat.  The negative self-image it leaves a person with may be more disabling than the disability itself.  A person with a disability is living in a world where he’s surrounded by the meta message that he’s not enough as he is.  You’re only okay if you’re ‘normal’ (whatever normal means).  We read about how important it is to convey to our kids that we love them unconditionally, but when it comes to kids with disabilities all of a sudden acceptance goes out the window and fixing them takes priority.  The fine line between encouraging Yirmiyahu and accepting him as he is now can be a challenge to balance but I hope I’m getting the hang of it.

 I decided that I wanted to quit therapy but I had some fear around that.  Fear of being seen as a neglectful mother (I had way more than my share of that when Yirmiyahu was in the pediatric intensive care unit), fear of doing something different than everyone else, fear of burning my bridges.

I tried to quit but – surprise, surprise! – my ambivalence came through and I ended up making another appointment instead, after being told how important therapy is for him, with the implication that what kind of mother can’t find time in her schedule for something as critical to her child as this.

Last week I finally summoned my inner clarity and firmly told the therapist that if we couldn’t come every six weeks for a check-in visit, then we wouldn’t be coming at all.  I had asked about this option before and been told it was impossible.  But this time when she saw that I really wasn’t going to come again, she made an appointment for six more weeks.  She said she’ll see about when to schedule the next appointment after that.  I told her I’m not interested in discussing it at every visit; six weeks is what we want right now.  In the past I’ve allowed myself to get sucked into discussions that have no productive purpose since their goal isn’t to listen to me and understand my concerns but to get me to buy into their way of doing things without questioning them.  Yirmiyahu has an inner schedule like every child and with support he’s going to learn to do what is important for him to learn when he’s ready.  We can support him but we can’t make things happen.  He’s the one who will make it happen, not the professionals.  That trust in your child is where I see things very differently from the therapists and while it sounds like a small difference, it affects every aspect of how we see him and how we approach interventions.

When Yirmiyahu was younger, I advocated very hard for more services, which were then allotted to him.  At least verbally.  In reality that never happened.  I didn’t push it because by then I wasn’t sure that’s really what I wanted any more.  The reason I chose to continue with periodic therapy rather than quit altogether is that I’m not trying to do everything on my own; I value the experience of therapists and know that there are things I can learn from them.   I also wanted to leave the channels open in case we want services in the future.

Switching to a six week schedule gives me such a sense of freedom.  The summer break from therapy was wonderful – I was able to enjoy Yirmiyahu without constantly pulled back to an unproductive way of thinking about him and about myself.  It was also when he learned to crawl and to stand, all without official therapeutic interventions but with lots of support from us.  (The therapist was very surprised and impressed with how good his form was.)  During the first year, my feeling was, I’ll do whatever Yirmiyahu needs.  Imbalance is normal for many of us in the first year after the diagnosis.  But imbalance isn’t an ideal and you can’t live in that state forever. You have to find balance for the sake of every member of your family, and that means finding ways to live a normal life.  Weekly therapy stopped feeling like part of the solution and started feeling like part of our imbalance.

Not going to official therapy doesn’t mean that we won’t be doing anything to encourage Yirmiyahu’s development.  Of course we will.  It’s more an issue of looking for ways to provide him with a normal life while finding ways to integrate support naturally.  I have the books Gross Motor Skills for Children with Down Syndrome, Fine Motor Skills for Children with Down Syndrome (each of these books was written by therapists with extensive experience working with kids with T21 and are professional and detailed guides), Yoga for the Special Needs Child and a couple of books by Glenn Doman espousing a neurodevelopmental position- in addition to online reading these provide a pretty solid foundation of technical guidelines and alternative ideas to support him.

He’s a lucky baby to have siblings who play with him all the time – I think our kids really are the best therapists!  They involve him in their games, do fingerplays and sing songs with him, swing him on swings, play in the sand and go down slides at the park, and give him rides on his push car.  Today ds7 ran to get him from me so he could play with him in the ball pit at the park.  They put mattresses on the floor and put toys just out of his reach to encourage him to crawl.  They show him how to play with toys and give him lots of positive feedback.  Love is a positive motivator, and there’s no doubt that Yirmiyahu extends himself in order to interact with them more than he would for a therapist that he doesn’t have much of a relationship with.

And to be clear – I’m not against therapy; I’m open to increasing therapy visits in the future if I see that’s what will be most supportive of Yirmiyahu’s needs at that time.  But now it’s not and sometimes having the courage to support your child looks like this.

Avivah

Splashing around at bathtime

parenting, Trisomy 21

Today is Day 10 of 31 for 21, a blogging effort to raise awareness of Trisomy 21.
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I feel like this has been a heavy week with my posting thanks to the accident, so today I thought I’d share something a little lighter to bring a smile to your face.

Here’s a two minute video starring our little bundle of sunshine during bath time when we first transferred him to this baby bath from our previous set up two months ago. Okay, so it takes me a while to get these technical things done, what can you do?

We don’t usually follow our kids around with a camera taking pictures or videos but Yirmiyahu was having so much fun that we wanted to capture it! Even though he got startled every time he splashed his face, he had a great time, and so did we watching him!

Bath time. You’ll see at the end that he pulls to stand twice and plops right back down- at that time he was just learning to stand up.

Avivah

Planning your week based on your higher values

homemaking, homeschooling, parenting, personal development

I’ve been thinking about different aspects of time and life management lately, precipitated by a discussion with a man who is starting his own business, in addition to a full time supervisory position at work.  I asked him about how he’s finding time to start a new business when he comes home exhausted after a long day,  and he pointed to the bulletin board in his office that was separated into four equal quarters.  He was about to explain when I nodded and told him I understood.

I was really grateful for this reminder of a principle that is so important but I’ve let it slide out of my life.  That’s the principle of organizing your life around what is known as the four quadrants.  (This is some of Steven Covey’s teaching, who is one of the two most insightful and far reaching authors I have read.)  I thought this was too complicated for a blog post but I briefly explained it to dd17 who has already started implementing it and has been finding it very helpful.

In short, every activity in life can be categorized in one of four quadrants.  The first quadrant is for things that are urgent and important.  The second quadrant is for things that are important and not urgent.  The third quadrant is for things that are urgent and not important. And the fourth quadrant is for things that are not urgent and not important.

You have no choice but to spend time in Quadrant 1 (Q1 from now on).  These are things that can’t be ignored, serious issues that leave you no choice but to deal with them.  Crisis falls into this quadrant.

The second quadrant is super powerful but the most neglected.  The more time you spend here, the less time you need to spend in Q1.  This is the quadrant of planning, reflection, spiritual growth, personal renewal – eating well, exercise, meditating.  The kind of things you never manage to find time to do because you’re too busy and one day you’ll get around to it.

The third and fourth quadrant are time wasters.  Q3 is filled with things that seem important because they’re so urgent and that’s why it takes up so much of our time.  Phones ringing, people knocking at the door or insisting they need something from us leave us feeling that this is a really important thing to do right now.  But they aren’t.

Q4 is non important, non urgent activities – time wasting activities that people overuse with the stated purpose being to relax from their stressful lives.  If it’s a meaningful relaxing activity that leaves you feeling recharged, it goes in Q2.  If it’s mind numbing and excessive, you’re looking at Q4.

So the first thing you need to do is assess what roles you play in your life, what activities they involve, and determine where each of these items are on the quadrants. The first two quadrants are where you want to spend most of your time but most people are spending the majority of their time in Q1 and Q3, the urgency quadrants.  We live in an urgency culture.  We can get addicted to the feeling or urgency because it makes us feel important to be so busy.  The problem is that urgency and importance aren’t the same, so all of this activity can leave a person feeling empty.

The goal is to move towards spending more time in Q2 – this is where quality of life comes from.  Where does the time to do that come from?  Q3 and Q4, the quadrants that will suck out all your life energy and leave you with nothing to show for it.  The more time you spend in Q2, the smaller the number of burning items in Q1 will become.  The man I mentioned at the beginning of the post told me when he first took this job, everything was urgent, rush, rush, rush.  After a month of putting practices based on these principles into place, things were running in a much calmer way.

Categorizing your activities is individual – an activity that one person experiences in one way can be experienced totally differently by someone else.

I used some of my resting time the day after my accident to do some quadrant planning.  I’d been thinking about it since last week and was planning to find a chunk of time to do some uninterrupted thinking so I took my opportunity when it presented itself!  After some reflection and writing, I took out my planner and scheduled in the Q1 and Q2 activities for the week.  This is the idea behind something I wrote about a long time ago, putting in the big rocks first.  (You’ll have to look it up if you’re interested.  :))

After you write down your important quality of life type activities for the week, then you schedule everything else around that.  You can spend your days doing little things that need to be done all day long, and get to the end of a day feeling as if you have nothing to show for your efforts.  When you prioritize your activities and execute around them, you can get lots of the smaller things done in between the big things and at the end of the day feel a sense of satisfaction that you’ve done things that really mattered to you.

Though I’ve just started doing this again, it’s been really good.  Even when things happen to throw off my time schedule that would have previously left me extremely frustrated, I still had a clear idea of what was my priority for the day and that kept me focused even when everything else about my day changed.  I made time for some deep thinking, time to write out some of my values and priorities, time to spend with my mom, time to speak to a relative in the US who I rarely talk to (great aunt).  I got all my homeschooling paperwork written up.  I went through 2000 digital photos on my camera and chose out about 10% to print out; I haven’t printed out photos in over two years though our family enjoys being able to look at albums to remember our experiences.  Now I can delete everything from my camera.  (Getting rid of clutter is a Q2 activity.)

My house wasn’t clean at the end of the day, since physically I’m more limited than usual right now.  I like when things look neat, but I was still able to feel a sense of accomplishment because the things that really mattered to me (and these will be different for each person) things it’s so easy to be too busy for – were done.

This is an incredibly powerful way to live life if done consistently.  I hope I haven’t made it seem to obvious in my effort to simplify a lot of material.  Please let me know if this sounds helpful to you!

Avivah

31 for 21 – Look at your child, not the timetable

parenting, Trisomy 21

It’s hard to believe that a year has gone by since I participated in the 31 for 21 2012 blogging effort to raise awareness of Trisomy 21, more commonly known as Down syndrome.  There are 31 days in October, and Trisomy 21 occurs when the 21st chromosome is triplicated – hence the name – and for this month bloggers across the blogosphere are joining in.  During this month I won’t be posting only about Trisomy 21, though there will probably be more posts on the topic than usual.  But I will be mentioning my participation at the beginning of each post.

My general perspective on parenting is that every child has his growth curve (physically and emotionally) and we need to have patience and trust the individual’s process.  Sometimes there are things you see in your child that cause you to worry because he doesn’t doesn’t seem to be getting it as quickly as most other kids his age.  This could be academic, behavioral, psychological – and you have to let go of your fear and shift your thinking to believe in him so that you can reflect that back to him.

That’s why one of my favorite children’s picture books is Leo the Late Bloomer.  Leo is a lion cub that can’t do anything right.  All his friends pass him in all areas of development, and while his father tries not to show how worried he is, he keeps seeing Leo failing in all the areas that his friends are succeeding in.  Reading, writing, speaking, drawing, eating.  Time passes and no improvements, until suddenly, one day Leo ‘blooms’ – he seemingly overnight acquired proficiency in all these areas.

I’ve often thought how true this is of child development, and how important a parent’s trust in a child is to the process. And yet I sometimes feel I’m mentally groping to find the right balance in this area when it comes to Yirmiyahu (now fifteen months).

There have been two developmental milestones that I’ve been concerned about in recent months: eating and crawling.  Yirmiyahu hardly eats any solids and that’s not for lack of effort on my part.  And though Yirmiyahu started to army crawl a tiny bit when he was thirteen months, he prefers to sit and actively resists being put down on his stomach.   My question for myself – how much to trust his internal timetable, and how much to push him?  It’s not one or the other, but sometimes doing too much on one side of the equation leads to too little on the other.

All of this wondering about these two concerns came to a quick conclusion recently.  Two weeks ago Yirmiyahu got his first two teeth which were rapidly followed by another three.  Five teeth in two weeks!  Sometime in this same period, Yirmiyahu’s eating suddenly dramatically changed.  For months he rarely ate more than a teaspoon of food a day no matter what I tried – suddenly he’s eating several teaspoons of food at each meal!  My naturopath told me that until the teeth come in, a child is physiologically unable to digest starches.  Perhaps his body is finally able to tolerate solids foods and that’s why he’s suddenly eating?  I don’t know but it’s amazing how these two issues resolved themselves literally overnight without any intervention on my part.

As far as the crawling?  After almost two months of being physically able to crawl but resisting any efforts to be on his tummy, in the last week he’s suddenly decided he wants to crawl!  Not huge distances yet, but he’s doing it himself because he wants to.  We didn’t change anything we were doing, but it’s as if the internal sensor told him he’s ready to do this now.

Seeing these noticeable changes in such a short time has helped me find some inner balance and regain my trust in his individual process.  It’s helping me to let go of some of the worries about developmental steps being too delayed if I don’t push harder.  It’s challenging enough with a typical child to trust his inherent growth process when faced with issues that don’t match what is considered the norm, but it’s an extremely prevalent way of thinking about T21 so you have to really choose the paradigm you want your mind to spend time in!

Trusting in his inner time frame doesn’t mean we don’t provide him with a stimulating environment – it means while we do whatever we feel is in his best interest, we let go of the inner tension that tells us we have to make something happen or else.   Letting go makes it so much easier to enjoy the process of watching him grow up rather than worrying about things not happening fast enough.  While we’ll continue to read, talk, play with him – I don’t want to get hung up on the timetable; I don’t want to worry that I’m not enough because he’s not hitting those milestones by a given time.  Yirmiyahu is showing me that with our support and love, he’ll continue to do things when he’s ready.

Avivah