Family
A place for posts about our family, our challenges, successes, and everything we do and enjoy. We hope to connect with others who face the same challenges we do and want people to see that they're not alone, that everyone doesn't live perfectly, and that we are all perfectly imperfect.
Suffering Through the Pandemic, One Child’s Journey
How many of you are so sick and tired of this pandemic? I know I sure am. I will not say everything about the pandemic has been horrible. In the beginning, I enjoyed how slow life became. I loved all the canceled activities and us being able to be home as a family. We were able to spend a lot of quality time together. But, the pandemic wasn’t all fun and games for our family. We had our struggles. Online schooling was brutal. Some days it would take my oldest son five or six hours a day to do his school work. There were lots of tears from my daughter, who was in third grade. My preschooler did pretty well, but somedays, it was hard to get her to sit in front of the computer. My third grader is the one that struggled the most with everything. She did well at first; she got up and did her homework without question. After a couple of weeks, she started to regress. Her birthday is in April, and she had a hard with her birthday because we were stuck home. We couldn’t plan a party or do much of anything. It was a little underwhelming. I tried my best to make it a good day, but it was still hard for her. The day after her birthday, she came into my room at bedtime and started crying. She said she wanted everything to go back to normal. That night she laid by me and cried herself to sleep. That is when I knew we had a big problem that we needed to address. I knew she was…
Why You Should Do a Mother and Daughter Bookclub
This past year my daughter and I were asked to join a neighborhood book club for mothers and daughters. I was initially hesitant because we didn’t have the time to add something else to our schedule. I am not the fastest reader either, so I wasn’t sure if we would finish the books we needed to read in time each month or not. In the end, though, we decided to join. I am so happy that we did. It has been such a wonderful bonding experience for us. Our book club includes girls ages 7 thru 11. Both of my daughters are in that age group. They are both welcome to the club, but my 7-year-old isn’t always interested; however, my 11-year-old is eager to meet and discuss what we’ve read. Each month we are assigned a book. Whichever mother and daughter host the book club for the month, will pick out the book. They also pick the evening that we will get together to discuss the book. When we go to our book club, the girls will run the discussion with a bit of help from their mom. The girls will come up with questions we will answer or discuss. When we have finished the conversation, we have treats or dessert. It isn’t very long, only about an hour or so. But it works because the girls at that age don’t have a very long attention span. In our book club, some mothers like to read the book separately from their daughters. A few will also listen to it in the car with an audiobook. I like to sit down at night and read…
How to Survive Summer Break With a Summer Activites Poster
Summer break is here! For parents like me, it’s a love/hate relationship with summer! I love to be at home, but I know it is essential for the kids to get out and have fun. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get a little nervous about what I will do to entertain the kids for three months in the summer. I worry they won’t have enough activities, or I won’t be able to do enough to keep them entertained. The thing I like to do most, and one way my family survives summer break, is with a summer activities poster. What is a summer activities poster, you might ask? It is so simple; it is a large poster with all the fun ideas and activities written on it that we want to accomplish during the summer. As we do an activity, we cross it off, and when we need something to entertain us, we’ll look at the poster and choose one of the activities we have yet to do. To create a summer activities poster, you need three things: One large poster board A lot of colorful markers (we prefer to use colored Sharpies) Fun and silly stickers When we create our summer activities poster, we first decorate the poster with a heading written all fancy and crazy! We like to have fun with this. We’ll put things like “Our Awesome and Amazing Summer Activities” or “2022 Summer Of Fun!” Then we’ll add some stickers to it! The kids go crazy with this one! Once we’ve got our heading on the poster, and it’s got stickers on it, we write as many ideas…
Should You Medicate Your Child for ADHD?
Should you medicate your child for ADHD? That’s the big question. I want to tell you about my experience and share the decision we made on whether or not we should medicate our son for his ADHD. Before I get started, I want to remind you that I am not a doctor. I have no medical background. I am just a mom with a child with ADHD that wants to share my experience with medicating our child for ADHD. First, I know that medicating your child with ADHD is controversial. I only want to share what we did as a family and our experiences. We met with an ADHD specialist once my son was diagnosed with ADHD. We talked in-depth about what the best action for our son would be. Our specialist helped inform us about the different types of medication and the effects and side effects of the medicine. He also educated us on what we could continue to expect if we chose not to medicate our son. The specialist left it entirely up to us as parents, and In the end, we decided the best path for us was to medicate our son. We thought long and hard about what to do. We did our research at home. We wanted to give our son the best chance, both at school and at home. For us, that best chance was to medicate him. Understand, there wasn’t anything we viewed as negative about our son. He is brilliant, has a curious mind, and would often hyper-focus on various things. At school, he struggled, and it was difficult for him to make it through an entire…
Our Experience With an ADHD Diagnosis
Our son was pretty young when he was diagnosed with ADHD, inattentive type. He was halfway through second grade. He would have been seven, turning eight. It would have taken us much longer to have my son tested for ADHD if it weren’t for his second-grade teacher. I am incredibly grateful for her. I have a hard time remembering what happened last week, let alone ten years ago! Bear with me while I recall these events. When my son was a baby, I never really noticed anything, at least not that I remember. I didn’t start seeing anything different until he was a little older. I think I wasn’t paying much attention because we focused on understanding his tactile defensiveness and getting a diagnosis for that. Looking back on it, the only thing that I remember that would have made me question ADHD is that he could never do two-step commands. I always had to ask him to do one step at a time. For example, I could never ask him to put his shoes on, get his coat on, and then put his book bag on in one sentence. I had to break up my instructions. In first grade, his teacher mentioned that he had difficulty following directions. I just thought that was my son being my son. I didn’t know anything about it, so we didn’t do anything. His first-grade teacher ended up having my son tested at the school without our permission. That made me pretty upset. I wasn’t upset that he got tested, just that his teacher didn’t inform us or ask for our approval. With that incident with his teacher,…
A Mother’s Experience With Tactile Defensiveness
I am sure there are some of you reading this who are wondering what tactile defensiveness is. It is a term used to describe someone very sensitive to touch. As a result, someone who experiences tactile defensiveness is much more sensitive to touch than usual. Our son, who is 14 years old, has been diagnosed with tactile defensiveness. He received his diagnosis when he was 18 months old. As parents, we became concerned that he wasn’t walking or trying to walk. It also concerned us that he would pull his feet up to avoid standing when we would try and have him stand up on our laps. Also, when we would try and have him stand up on the ground, he would do the same thing. He would never let the bottom of his feet touch anything and do everything he could to avoid it! My husband and I asked our family doctor about our concerns, and he referred us to a physical therapist. When we went to the physical therapist, our son was diagnosed five minutes into our appointment. It was extremely quick. It surprised me, but the therapist immediately knew our son’s diagnosis as he watched our son’s behavior! Our son avoided physical contact because of how things felt on his skin. The therapist explained it like this to me. He said that when you cut your fingernails too short, the skin under the nail gets exposed, and it feels weird. He said that is the feeling my son has all over his body. After I learned what it was, we realized that there were signs of it from the day he was…
Learning to Walk With Tactile Defensiveness
After our son was diagnosed with tactile defensiveness, we had a lot to learn. As parents, we needed to understand what tactile defensiveness was. My husband nor I had ever heard of it before. We also needed to know what we could do at home to help him. We had to educate our families on what it was also. No one in our families had heard of it either. Our number one concern after his diagnosis was helping him to learn how to walk. It took us almost five months to achieve this goal, from the diagnosis to him being able to walk on his own. These were the steps that we took as parents for him to learn to walk. 1. Physical Therapy We would go to physical therapy regularly. We would never have known what to do if we hadn’t kept going. There were so many different activities at physical therapy that they would do with our son. I can’t remember everything that they did, but the one thing that they used was hanging beads. All they would do is have our son put his feet under these hanging beads, and they would make them swing across his feet. At first, he hated this but eventually, he got used to it. When we would go to therapy, they would always give us this to do at home. 2. Brushing His Feet One of the primary activities the therapist would have us do at home was brushing our son’s feet. I know it sounds a little weird, and you are probably wondering what that is. Our therapist gave us this little sponge that was…
About Our Family
We are a perfectly imperfect family. As I think of this phrase, I believe it describes our family perfectly. We have our ups and downs, our good times and bad, but we’re always together and working to be the best family we can be. Are we perfect, no, but at the same time, I think we’re close. A Little About Each Of Us My name is Brynn. I am a stay-at-home mom. I am an introvert and very recently I have discovered that I am a highly sensitive person. I love to be at home. My favorite hobbies are reading, cooking, watching movies, puzzles, and playing games with my family. My husband works in tech, he’s a major geek, and works from home. He has been working from home since our firstborn was about 6 months old. Having a husband who works from home has its ups and downs. Without his computer knowledge, I never would have been able to put this blog together. We have a son that is 14. He is obsessed with playing video games. When we can pull him away from his video games he likes to play his drums, swim, and play golf. He has had his fair share of challenges. When he was 18 months old he was diagnosed with tactile defensiveness. He is very sensitive to touch. When he was in second grade he was also diagnosed with ADHD, Inattentive Type. We have a daughter who is 10. She is our tomboy and our athlete. She loves soccer. Her passion though is art. She loves to draw, and make crafts out of anything that she can find. She…
