So... Feisty Pants is sleeping so much better this week. Yayyyyy. So her
behavior is better in school. Yayyyyy. She seems to be doing better
physically day to day. Double yayyy. Now, I just have to figure out how. It
could be the extra spinning they are doing at school. She is in a therapy
protocol known as astronaut training (which is basically spinning her) that
works wonders on kids like FP who crave heavy vestibular input. (Read that as
heavy duty rough and tumble physical input- jumping, running,spinning, loud
music, rough housing, etc.) It could also be the sleepytime tea we are giving
her. (Thanks, Celestial Seasonings, for that gift to the sleepless.)
It could even be the fact that her sister has had her baby.
(A HEALTHY bouncing baby Winston Churchill, thank the stars) and is no longer
uncomfortable and sleepless herself. (Just sleep deprived.) Feisty Pants and
Hippie Pants have always weird. eerie parallels in activity and moods. Have you
all noticed this with your kids or siblings? I'm an adoptee, so I'm not
genetically related to my siblings so I never noticed this phenomenon growing
up. FP spent six weeks in a NICU, which are always tucked away and hidden in
quiet hallways and behind locked doors. (I went over in the am. Goo and Hippie
Pants would arrive after he got out of work) The nurses would walk by FP's
bassinet and say, "Oh look, her sister is in here in the hospital." I thought
they had cameras. Turns out they didn't. They simply watched Feisty Pants'
body functions on the monitors. Her breathing and heart rate would slow but her
sat rate (a measure of how much oxygen is in the blood) would rise- a sign of
physical relaxation. They told me it was common for the babies to relax when
siblings got close enough- not even same room. Same floor.
So, now we are gonna make ourselves nuts trying to figure out
what we did right. This happens a lot. Not as a lot as I would like. Trying
to replicate a success, any success, is a problem I would like to have an
abundance of. But it makes me crazier than trying to fix a mistake. I
instantly turn into some of ocd case trying to recreate the magic. (Let's see
last week we played this cd twice and sang before bed. We will do EVERY night
this week. Two weeks ago we went for a walk in the a.m.- so we will do it twice
a day this week. Crap like that.) It must feel like she's living in a wacky
sitcom. (Dinner with the B.F. Skinners! a laugh riot)
Sigh, but you do lose it a bit you know. You look at your
kids when they struggle and work hard. You want so much to fix it all for them,
disabled or typical. Fit in or stand out. Doesn't matter, you just want to
make everything smoothly run for them. Even when you know it doesn't do any
real good to make it too easy. Even when you know it's not possible anyway. So now that she's sleeping better, I'll be up at night trying to figure out a
thousand ways to keep that up. Figures.
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