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Feb
07
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 I do not think outside the box — I am a rule follower. I would have been mortified if I did not have my homework ready to hand in when I was a kid. This is why having ADHD children has been such a challenge for me. It would not have been so bad had they had the same symptoms and behaviors. That would have been awesome, but that’s not what happened. These ADHD boys of ours have totally different deficits — and totally different ways of being disorganized.
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Blog Posts by Emmie
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Jan
23
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I am probably the only parent looking at a child’s grades and saying, “A’s & B’s? HOW CAN THAT BE? I want answers!” My stepson is in the 6th grade. He comes home each night and struggles with his homework. We have determined that he skims — everything. He skims the directions. He skims the reading assignment. He guesses at multiple choice. He will copy sentences the teacher wrote, word for word, as an answer. If asked to reword in is own words, he will change one word. If asked to write 3-5 sentences, you can be sure he will write 3, but say the same thing, 3 different ways. He cannot spell; he mixes capital letters with lower case. He writes above the line and over top of other letters below. He has no clue how to use punctuation. The curious thing is that his work is considered acceptable.
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Jan
10
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My son gave me a backhanded compliment recently. I was planning our annual family Channukah party at the end of last year, trying to coordinate it with our children’s visitation schedules. Both my children and my stepchildren spend Christmas with their other parent. Since Channukah falls at different times each December, we sometimes have to wait until Winter break, when all of the boys are at home, to have our party. This past holiday was especially hectic – we realized with a shock that on any given night we would be short one child. My oldest son said, “I know you like to do everything perfect and be organized and you always pull it off, but this year I think you have to give that up.” I was so touched. It was a backhanded way of telling me he appreciated my hard work in keeping everything organized. (Compliments and thank you’s are hard to come by from teenagers, so I grab them when I can!)
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Dec
15
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I have a child in my home who does not learn from consequences. He does not seem to see any connection between his actions, the effect it has on himself or others — or that the same thing happened last time he did it. You can imagine how frustrating this is.
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Dec
01
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I posted a blog several months ago that described how overwhelmed I was. Many people responded ( even people in my real life) and told me to stop beating myself up. To recap without rewriting the whole thing: I have always been very organized. I have to be. It keeps me sane and calm. I have two children, one who is 20 with bipolar disorder and one who is 14 with anxiety, ADHD, depression, insomnia and has also been recently diagnosed with Type I diabetes. Two years ago, my husband’s ex-wife asked us to take in their 9-year-old son, who has some serious behavior issues. She felt we were much better equipped to help him than she was and that our home was a good alternative.
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Nov
04
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Self defeating behaviors. Negative thinking. Procrastination. Self-destructive behaviors. Self-fulfilling prophecies. If you have a child (or children!) with ADHD, anxiety or depression, you have seen these behaviors close up and personal. These children get frustrated and believe they can’t do something — then they won’t do it and voila! “See Mom, I told you I couldn’t do it!” They’ll look at an assignment and see how long it is, or look at a book and flip immediately to the back to see how many pages it is, and without reading it at all, decide they just cannot do it. The sad part is, these children are masters at self-sabotaging.
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Sep
30
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My friends tell me I have an unusual relationship was with my former in-laws — my ex-husband’s parents. The way I’ve always looked at it was that these are my children’s grandparents, and I’ve always had a relationship with them was separate from my ex-husband. I never looked at that as unusual, either. My ex- worked nights and I was often at family events without him. Even before we were married, my then-future mother-in-law invited me to lunch or shopping. My own mother suffered from emphysema and COPD so as my children grew and she got sicker, I looked more and more to my mother-in-law for support as a new mom.
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Sep
06
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My baby went off to high school today. This morning was full of anxiety. None of his clothes fit. His hair curled up at the ends and he couldn’t get it to stay down. And I wasn’t feeling much better. I don’t recall being this melancholy when my oldest, now 20, went off to high school. (Maybe because he was at a school for children with emotional issues and it was small and sheltered and my baby is in public school?)
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