Monday morning: Julia is grumpy! Very resistant. I offer her choices -- getting dressed or sitting on the step (her time out place) -- she controls herself well enough to chose getting dressed, but all the time she is telling me how she will hurt me, including letting the giant lady bugs bite me. Each idea she comes up with (and she is not threatening me with hitting or some other punishment with her hands, etc.) I turn around and it is clear that she doesn't want to have these bugs, dinosaurs, or rhinoceros to attack her. I give her the general rule for the first time -- Do unto others . . . , in plain English of course. She reluctantly eats but when she gets up she takes the whole table clothe down, spills a glass of water and lots of crumbs on the floor. Nothing is hurt but I am really frustrated and yell at her. She listens, does exactly what I say, and then when I am doing her hair, tells me that she is scared of me. I do apologize to her and explain my frustration. I think I lose her on my explanation.
Oh, I don't want this precious child scared of me, but why can she pull it together so well when she is scared. I know that it is good that she can tell me exactly what she is feeling. How I wish she could learn not to be so difficult and frustrating!
We have slowly re-integrated gluten into Julia's diet, and this weekend, she had a piece of pizza and a piece of cheese cake. Is some of this behavior due to this? Is it due to the drug, which has a side effect of irritability? Is it just normal irritability?
I don't think the drug is doing anything apart from making her sleepy at night, which is, of course, very nice. She is still not getting mellow and tired before bedtime, but she does relinquish herself to sleep incredibly quickly -- like 10 minutes! We have another week and a half before we see the doc.
We invited some neighbors over for dinner last night. They have three boys -- 9, 7, 3 -- and it was pretty chaotic. The things that usually work -- letting the kids eat quickly and watch a movie, or letting them play with all the toys in the house and come to the table when they are starving did not work. The dad wound up taking the 3 year old home because he was just too tired, the 7 year old ate supper on our deck out front. Only the 9 year old watched the movie with Julia. David and I did manage a good conversation with the mom. And none of the behavior bothered us in the least. In fact the relief was the it wasn't our kid causing the disruption.
David goes to three doc appointments this week. Hopefully, all will be resolved by the end of the week and he will go on the transplant list.
1 comment:
Just a thought I don't know how much you have talked and explained to her about David's condition ...maybe some of Julia's irritability has to do that. She senses the natural tension in the air and is afraid and scared .
Also maybe you could see the odd humor when Julia tells you that a rhinocerous is going to harm you, turn it around and make lite of it
"A RHINOCEROUS" btw how do you keep a rhinocerous from charging ? take away his credit card.
Post a Comment