Trying to Slow Down...

The last week and a half have been crazy. I finally "finished" Alivia's bed. Still need to add some trim, but she's been sleeping in it for a week now and loves it. The bed was an incredibly consuming project taking up all my weekends for the past month plus. We were literally working on it all day and way into the night. I'm pleased with the result, though. It was definitely worth the time and effort! Livi loves the personalization and I love the sense of accomplishment! I've never designed and built a bed before!

I read a report on some new FASD research recently that supported something I already suspected from my own research on brain injury. It basically said that giving kids tasks that involve fine motor skills and increasing the difficulty as they become more adept helps to improve memory and cognitive function in kids with FASDs. My struggle has been finding a task that Alivia enjoys enough to persist at, but I think we finally have one--video games! Alivia loves playing Mario Karts and Toy Story on our Wii. She's not very good at either yet, but I am seeing improvement in her gaming skills and hope that this will eventually pay off with improvement in her memory, problem solving, and attention span.

She also surprised me big time a couple nights ago. She had opened one of the Wii game boxes and pulled out the instruction booklet which she promptly began to shred. (Alivia shreds every bit of paper she can get her eager little hands on.) When I scolded her and told her to put the paper back in the box she got frustrated and started to throw a fit. Out of patience, I told her to go upstairs and go to bed. She walked to the stairs and stood there crying for a couple minutes then got quiet. Another minute went by and she suddenly marched herself back into the living room and started picking up the paper. When I (cautiously) asked her what she was doing, she replied that she was cleaning up her mess. She then followed that up with an apology for making the mess. Wow... Some days I get so frustrated with her that it's so easy to forget she really is six years old and actually pretty smart, then she does something like this to remind me.

The other big news for the week--I went to my first FASD Family Support Group meeting. The group had disbanded when I went looking for it a couple years ago, but started up again this month. I enjoyed having the opportunity to interact personally with other people who can relate to exactly what I am going through. People who haven't experienced it just don't understand. Even some people who are experiencing it with me don't understand. They can't come out of denial long enough to deal with the reality. It was wonderful to be able to cry and to be able to laugh and to not have to worry that anyone was judging me as a parent or thought I was exaggerating when I talked our experiences. I can't wait for the next meeting!

In the meantime, I am trying to slow down... seriously! I'm going to take a couple semesters off from teaching and try to spend more time with Alivia and also try to spend more time on myself. I'm hoping to start an exercise regiment and maybe start taking advantage of PumpItUp's parents nights out on the first Friday of each month. I could go see a movie that's not rated G...

~ Jeana