Monkey is 8 years old and does back handsprings in my living room. Not my favorite place for that, admittedly, but considering as a toddler in foster care she was Failure to Thrive, and that she has Bipolar and Anxiety… I’m just happy she’s doing any leaping at all! Gymnastics and dance get her through…
Category Archives: Mental Health
Our Bipolar Happy Hour
It’s always the same. Like Bill Murray’s movie, Groundhog Day. It’s the same in our home every single day, no matter what we do, what medications we try, what therapies we employ. My 9 year old just lives on the relentless Bipolar mood roller coaster. Every. single. day. Every day: …I wake her gently, quietly……
Managing My Girl’s Tough Bipolar Weeks
Tough week here. My 9 year old forgot to take her meds once last weekend, and she spun into a pit of moody darkness for the rest of the week. It’s just part of the job with a neuro-atypical child, these zero-to-sixty meltdowns. It’s the crappy part of the job. Here’s how I handled it…
Staying Sane While Raising a Bipolar Child
She stomps out of the room, each firmly-planted step shaking the floor. Tear-stained, she plunges her face into the pillows on her bed, where she screams and cries. As she starts to calm down, I feel the adrenaline retreating into the places from which it flooded my body. Breathing, relaxing myself, I tend to her…
Raising a child with two competing special needs
I silently nudged her in the darkness. Slipped her out of her top bunk. Wrapped her in a blanket and ushered her to the van. Maybe if I didn’t wake her just yet, she’d forgive me, I thought. The sun wasn’t up yet, but I’d already been up most of the night, fearing the next…
Our Role & words hurt
So I was thinking, draw 3 circles on a piece of paper. One inside the other, so really you have 3 cirles around each other(as pictured) The inner circle is our children, this is their culture of being a child with special needs. The middle circle is us, the parents. We’re not in the…
What I wish for my little girl
She’s only 8 years old. But she has been through more than anyone I know in her young life, both from her foster care history and because of her bipolar. My heart is in a hundred pieces for her much of the time. And so, I’m sharing something a little different today. Something from the depths of my heart on behalf of my daughter…
My Angel
I knew that my body was giving everything to this little person growing inside me. I knew my life would never be the same; that our lives would never be the same. There were no words to express the happiness I knew my belly contained. I knew that this little being was my angel; my…
When she won’t hug Grandma
We flew 8 hours with 4 kids and umpteen bags across the country to visit Grandma. Within 2 minutes they’d already hurt her feelings. It’s always been stressful to balance the expectations of extended family and the needs of my two older girls, adopted as toddlers from foster care. Both their difficult history and their…
Waiting. And why it’s not so bad.
Raise your hand if you love to wait! Yeah, me neither. We spend lots of time waiting as parents with special needs kids. Waiting for things like doctor’s visits, referrals, our children’s therapies to take, results of the last lab work-up… For the past week we’ve been waiting with one of our daughters – waiting…