Ok, so as much as I would love to say I’m dedicated to writing frequently I am guilty of being negligent towards my blog post lately. I have been a busy bee off collecting knowledge and grey hairs apparently.
I plan to get back into writing because as I mentioned before it does help to soothe me. Also I got very into Jane the virgin over the summer and her passion for writing in it really made me wish I was more dedicated to writing things.
In previous blog posts I did mention how our son was struggling in school. Academically he was doing fine. In fact his teacher said he was one of the advanced readers in her class and mathematics he was about average to his peers. His struggles came with behavior. For a long time we battled with whether or not to have him assessed for anything. Was there more to it? Or was he just being a kid? Was he spoilt? Did we do something wrong? All these questions plagued me. My husband and I would argue on how to discipline him. What we both felt was the way to go with him. We put him into the school therapy sessions and honestly that helped him a lot. He was placed with a forty carrots therapist named Erika who was absolutely amazing. They formed a great bond and she was pleasant, kind and just wonderful to work with him. She thought him so many skills which we noticed him using quite often.
However, behavior at school remained the same. Explosive outbursts. Constant phone calls home. It was very stressful on me too. I was always on edge for the phone to ring and just did not know what to do. Trust me here, I’m not a mom that’s going to swear blindly how he doesn’t act like that at home but frankly he didn’t act like that at home. Yes, there were tantrums, yes he would whine and tell us no but school was a whole other can of worms. The boy the described when he was not on his best days, was not my boy. My son just didn’t do these things. But he did do them. Just not for my eyes. We finally caved and discussed it with our pediatrician who had him evaluated and the results came back, our son has ADHD and ODD. I still struggle with the diagnosis to be honest. Some things he does I can totally see it, and others I just think, he’s just being a kid. I am also not going to let my opinions, since I’m not a doctor, block my son from having a better life.
We started him on meds after his diagnosis and it didn’t go down well. To begin with we didn’t want him on them but we said we would try them. Starting with aptensio XR we noticed no change. He was still wildly hyper and when he was angry it intensified his anger, so we switched. He was put on vyvanse then but that’s just made him super irritable and frustrated. I know you are supposed to play around with different meds to find the right one but when our son was telling us how confused he was feeling because he didn’t know why he was angry and feeling the way he was, we just said no more. We pulled him from it immediately and decided to try a more natural approach.
I looked up adhd and tried to understand it more. I ordered books on treating it without meds, different ways to help. I am still learning. He continued his play therapy with forty carrots through the summer and Erika explained to me that jaxons front lobe is still developing something I wouldn’t of thought about. We just assume these kids are fully aware of what’s going on, not all kids are wired the same. They all develop at different rates. This made us think, That unless to us we notice he is having serious struggles maybe once he is older to consider the meds. As of now, Jaxon is keeping up with school work, he has friends, he has a great relationship with his family unit. We are setting him up to succeed.
I changed a few things to build better structure and disciplines. I’m working close with the teachers to help him there and I am slowly weaning in to changes in his diet. We are just about 1 month into school and so far he has done well. He has had 2 bad days in that time with only 1 of those being an aggressive day but I put that down to change in his routine as we were out of town for the weekend. The other day was because he lost a game so he cried and kept talking. This week however was marked down as a full good week with ZERO incidents!! That is huge and we were super happy!
I will post up a post soon about his chart system we use and eventually his diet changes but for now I just wanted to update the blog so that the rest I post doesnt seem so random. So there you have it. I am now and ADHD mom. Here’s to more research.
K xox
The Duffy’s diary 