In making more of an effort to keep updated on this blog, I have spent the last couple of days going through different topics that I should write about.
I instantly remembered reading conversations on the parent groups about this mysterious word that KS kiddos (and let’s be real, all kiddos) seem to melt down about. That pesky two letter word NO. And wouldn’t you believe, we have the same problem in our house!
We noticed it started to get worse at around his 3rd birthday. Which is also fitting because we didn’t have the traditional terrible 2s that most warn you about. Nope, we had the I may murder my child 3’s :D. However, the one parenting thing I can confidently say that my husband and I have on lock is maneuvering the word NO and also calming the tantrums to under 5 minutes without yelling or losing our cool.
So what do we do? Options.
This parenting tool originally was something I had “come up with” off the top of my head, but after a recent discovery – there are a lot of parenting books that use this method as well! WINNING!
So how do we use options instead of no? Well, if Cheekies is wanting something or is throwing a fit about something, we will give him two options to choose from that are parent approved in the direction we want him to go.
EXAMPLE: Halloween just happened and obviously Cheekies wants candy for breakfast dinner and lunch.. the candy is also a common tantrum we have faced the last month. 9 times out of 10 he wants candy BEFORE dinner.
Instead of telling him “NO. You don’t need candy.” I will first start by telling him that he needs to eat his dinner first and then he can have a piece of candy. I have already predicted that he will throw a fit, but trying to tell him he needs to eat before treats is something I find important because he will sometimes listen. (hooray on those days) But alas we normally get a small tantrum.
My next step is to crouch down on his level and give him his options: “Here’s the deal, we can either eat our dinner and get a piece of candy, or we can not eat our dinner and get zero pieces of candy. What would you like to do?” This gives him the control toddlers are subconsciously battling with as they mature, but it also allows them to do what you need them to do without telling them NO.
We have done this at home, in stores, at disneyland, and school, anywhere we need to. It works for us immensely and will probably be something we practice for a while. We have been able to get his tantrums calmed within 2 minutes of it starting which I find to be a success. And if the tantrum does turn into a mini meltdown, we go into our meltdown parenting style which I will go into on a different post, but its mainly giving them chill time and redirecting.
Anyways, I hope this helps for some of you. I believe this tool is probably best used the younger they are – not sure how it will work with older kiddos. And AGAIN, this is what we do and what works for us.
Share in the comments below what your experience with the word NO and how you overcome these battles 😀
An appointment we were genuinely excited for, turned to complete shit within the first 15 minutes of our meeting. !warning – unorganized rant ahead!
*I’m not going to publicly say where we were at or the Dr.’s name (however if you email me I would be more than happy to)*
A couple of weeks ago, we took Cheeks to his first geneticist appointment here locally in Reno. We didn’t know that there was one in town so we were extremely excited when we learned we could take Cheeks to a local Dr. rather than travel out of state.
After about a months wait, our appointment finally came. I had a wide range of questions that I wanted to discuss as well as was excited to hopefully learn some new things about KS I may not have known already.
When the Dr. came into the room, her demeanor was very… bitchy is probably the real term, but to be nice we will say harsh.
She rushed through the opening of her discussion and took out a stapled pamphlet and began “teaching” us about KS…(it would be nice if I could meet a Dr. who doesn’t have to read something off to me that I have already read)…. anyways – as she was rush reading through the paper, she stopped at a point where it talked about Tip of the Tongue phenomenon (you know that moment when you are trying to think of a word and its right at the tip of your tongue and you can’t figure it out?). She said that boys with KS struggle with this on a different level and that Cheeks will more than likely have this happen.
I thought to myself as she was talking, Cool…Â we will work on it – *cut off by Dr * “So your son is either going to internalize this and not make any friends, or he will become aggressive and you will have a lot of issues.”……… ok… waiting for the third option…… nothing…. blank stares… Me: “Well he has been doing pretty good right now and we are really working on trying to alleviate some of these issues -” Her: “Well he is only two.. once he hits about 5 everything goes down hill.”………………………What? I mean shit lady, lets throw another fucking black cloud on an already stressful situation.. You could have said something positive here. Fuck.
So she goes on talking more about unless information and categorizing my son into different groups… and at this point my anger thermometer is just sllllooooowwwwlllyyy growing… and then the mother load of stupid fucking comments came.
“OH.. and your son will more than likely not go to college.. KS men don’t go to college..” UM…. EXCUSE Â ME? “…..But its ok though..” (she can OBVIOUSLY see my face of pure explosion at this point).. “Blue collar work is fine too..”……Ok bitch… ok.. and I’m done. Not only was I extremely offended, but I just couldn’t fathom that something so ignorant, stupid, and insensitive was coming out of her mouth. And if you’re reading that and you think, awe thats not too bad… add a condescending and degrading tone on it and then re read. I. Was. PISSED.
So now that this main story (and trust me this isn’t even the whole appointment.. many more things happened), let’s discuss how I am feeling about all of this.
First of all.. I cannot wrap my head around how this woman was hired at a special needs facility. She was harsh, aggressive, insensitive, and honestly I didn’t think she knew as much about KS as she lead on. I don’t say that because the bullshit that ensued at our meeting, but supposedly she had a large amount of clients with KS and also extensive amounts of knowledge.. yet still read everything from a pamphlet..and any time I had a question, she read her answer from the papers.. I call bullshit on that. Personal opinion and not fact.. but my gut tells me bullshit.
Second, give us a little bit of fucking hope man. I left the meeting in tears because I felt that the whole thing was just her saying that your son is not going to succeed and this and that. You don’t even know my son.. you don’t know us.. I felt no hope… no positive.. and scared.
Listen, I am ok with hearing information that maybe I didn’t want to hear.. I’m ok with that. But KS is NOT a disease. There is a wide range of symptoms he COULD have.. not WILL have.. so there is a very large possibility that the things she listed will not happen. THAT and we found out when Cheeks was so young.. there is a lot of early prevention that we are blessed that we can start now.
Third, I absolutely FUCKING HATE when I feel like another fucking number at the DMV. All I want is a Dr. to sit down and TALK to me. Not spout off some random information that is easily accessible online and then make me feel stupid when I have legitimate questions about development and future planning. We need for Dr.s to help support us… not make us feel incompetent.
Needless to say – if you haven’t gotten the vibe already – we will not be seeing said Dr. again, and have plans to in fact travel outside of the state to hopefully get a better plan on the future to come.
Cheeks has been developing SOO wonderfully and we want to keep this momentum going!
The last few months have been a brutal Cheeks vs Bath battle…. The battle that cheeks had been winning… Until tonight.
Let’s go back to the day Cheeks met shower…
It was an ordinary afternoon.. And I was giving cheeks his bath. He was having a grand ol time! Playing, splashing, and putting his hands in the stream of the running faucet. To make the long story short, he found the shower release and well…. Showered himself silly… Scaring the ever loving Jesus out of him. Since then…. He would refuse a bath for the next 4 months, Leaving B and I to give him as many cloth baths as possible… Until with agonizing pain, we force him to take a bath. The screams that would come from him tore my heart out of my body and left me in tears.
We tried different things to ease the pain. Switch to the sink, add more duckies, add bubbles (which did NOT help at all!), I got in with him… It was a nightmare… Nothing was working.
Today was a ginormous leap as Brandon and I knew we could not wait any longer to give him a bath. So we took some time to brainstorm a bit and trucked over to babies r us to find something to help.
We decided on two bath toys, which Cheeks instantly became attached to. A swimming turtle, and a starfish water fountain. He held them through our adventure into Michael’s, and he knew that he had two toys when he got home.
When it came time for the bath, he patiently waited as we opened them up, explaining to him these were his bath toys, and that he would use them only in the bath. I had my swim suit on and the bath drawn and full of toys when we got up there. He knew what was happening and instantly started to become anxious and hesitant. I got into the bath and started playing with the water fountain starfish with hopes he would find interest. Nope… However he really wanted to play with the turtle… So Brandon hoisted him in with me where he started to cry as expected… But a different cry this time… Not as frightened. Brandon and I started to make our tones upbeat and excited while playing with his new toys.. Making him feel that it was extremely exciting… We slowly started to see him calm down… And after about 10 minutes of solid fake fun… He was settled and playing with his toys.. He sat on my lap, making sure I was in touching distance, and FINALLY allowed me to wash his body and hair in peace.
After he was all clean, we let him play, still sitting in my lap and in the water, until he decided he wanted to come out.. Praising him on how brave he was being. Heck we even refilled the hot water! He spent about 20 min playing :))
So after all this time… We had our first peaceful bath in about 4 months. Small steps and patience for this little guy.. But for now, I am a very happy mamma!
Xox
As a first time parent, I have moments where I have severe anxiety.. that twitch in your eye..that “Oh god no!”.. I have taken the time to list out my top 10 parent anxieties for your enjoyment ((in no particular order)).
1. Spaghetti Night: I think that any parent with a toddler will know exactly what I am talking about. We are a family of spaghetti lovers and have pasta at least once a week. We usually take the time for “prep time” before giving Cheeks his dinner. this includes a fully naked body, a bib, and our dog to clean up the thrown messes. 😀
2. Realizing you have forgotten the diaper bag: I have done this more times than I can count and literally get the biggest anxiety attack because of it. While driving all I can think is that he is going to have a giant blow out and my car is going to be covered in poop because I FORGOT THE DIAPER BAG. haha of course that’s a bit dramatic, but you moms know the type of shit that goes on in our brains sometimes ha
3. The calm before the “no nap” storm: Cheeks has really only never taken a nap once… and for those couple hours.. I just thought he was going to turn into this baby hulk. I felt like I was walking on eggshells the whole time… just waiting…..
4. Zero sound & zero smell poops: Maybe it’s just me.. but these freak me out… because you really just don’t know what you’re going to be dealing with..
5. Silence: No words needed. We all know silence is bad.
6. The sound of drawers opening: Cheeks it as a stage right now where he is finally tall enough to open all the drawers. We have all lower cabinets locked up, but now its time to venture upwards.. when your son runs into the living room with a giant knife in his hands for the first time… your heart flutters a bit. CURSE those curious assholes! *shaking my fist at them*.
7. “Hot dog! Hot dog! Hot diggity dog!!”: Remember that eye twitch I was talking about?…. ya… this.
8. When you are driving and look in the rearview mirror and your child looks like they cannot breath and are suffocating, but they are actually just pooping: This has freaked B and I out a couple times. Cheeks legitimately looks like he is dying in his carseat when he poops.
9. Parties: I always get really anxious when I am going to a birthday party or a gathering with a bunch of other parents. I honestly don’t care what other people think of my parenting style, but sometimes I cannot help but judge my own parenting by watching others and their styles. I also don’t know how to handle other children being inconsiderate.. and honestly my biggest anxiety is just trying not to lose my shit on other peoples kids.
10. Walking out of the stroller: I think right now this is my biggest anxiety. We have been slowly allowing Cheeks to walk outside of his stroller while we run errands.. but a couple of times he has thrown fits because he just wants to run free. It’s hard, and I know that the more we do it, the better he will get.. but yikes.. fits. *shivers*
So there you have it folks! My top ten parent anxieties!
Comment below YOUR personal parent anxieties!
xoxo Mammablutte
5.
As many of you can see, I changed my hair in the last couple of months! It’s been a great change I must say. Hot showers! White shirts! Pillowcases with no stains!
But now I’m left not knowing what to do with this blog! Bluette is obviously no more! Does it really matter? Should I change the blog?
What are your thoughts followers?
We had such a great Easter this year! Cheeks enjoyed hunting for eggs and obviously loves receiving gifts 🙂 We celebrated with family and grubbed out hard 🙂
We hope you all had as much of a good time as we did!