I’ve been thinking about pretending. The girls recently walked around the block riding small broomsticks. Amy started making monkey sounds and saying she was a monkey. Sarah heard this and started doing the same thing. At other times Amy says she is a cat. How easily and often kids pretend! Adults do too, I think, but we forget that we are pretending.
I am trying to sort out how I can honor my experience of something as being overwhelming (or any other emotion) while at the same time giving myself wiggle room to pretend I am not overwhelmed by such things. Maybe I initially was overwhelmed by a situation with lots of commotion and then in recognizing that, it became my story and then I locked myself in. In college, I had a role in a play where I did the opening monologue and then during intermission I did improv interactions with the audience. I was nervous before the play began, but to get in character I had to pretend I wasn’t nervous because my character was not nervous. Pretending I wasn’t nervous helped me actually let go of my nervousness. So… what if I could pretend that I wasn’t overwhelmed by lots of kids yelling or by the idea of home schooling, etc? What if I could pretend to be a mom who didn’t resort to anger as a means of controlling my kids sometimes? Would such pretense actually help change the situation? maybe.
Sarah is doing beautifully with using fuller sentences. I feel like whenever we have a precise language goal it is really easy for me (and others) to work towards it and Sarah excels at language practice. My consultation with M. helped me think about going towards academic goals with the same precision. For instance, instead of just wanting to help her practice writing, our goal could be to help her write her name clearly and with appropriately sized letters in the right order.
Sometimes Sarah’s sensitivity and awareness blow me away. Last night I had my first official cluster headache (CH) in over a year. #(*%&%&$#)((!!!!!!!!! I knew that this was a possibility because of the time of year and my past history with CH, but I was still very disappointed. I have been diligently working on relaxing my jaw and tongue and eye muscles way more often than usual. I have been making choices to be less stressed. I thought this would be enough, but it wasn’t. I was up in the night with a headache (mild for a CH but still no picnic) and I still have a whisper of it today. I feel tired and sad and disappointed. When I told Carl about it I started crying. Sarah came in from wherever she had been and stood next to me. Then she said, “Mom feeling sad” and climbed on my lap. She gave me chin presses, looked gently into my eyes, wiped a tear off my cheek, and then stayed snuggled on my lap for maybe half an hour. She seemed so aware of the situation and so kind.
Most of the word repetition disfluency that we had been noticing has gone away. I’m not sure when it stopped, but I am now considering that maybe it was related to a supplement. Sometimes when the skin on Sarah’s fingers gets unhappy and unhealthy then I stop some supplements (whatever was new and the digestive enzymes because she likes to have her fingers in her mouth while she chews the enzymes, which doesn’t seem like a good idea). The only way to really know is to get her back on the enzymes and newer supplements and see if the disfluency returns. Maybe it has nothing to do with supplements and is more about her learning whatever new skill she had been learning that meant her language took a small stumble.
One thing I’ve been appreciating lately is that when I go to bed I am often feeling excited about seeing the girls in the morning.
Our field trip this week was to go downtown to see a fountain and tall buildings. Then we went to a restaurant where I was pretty sure we could get something Sarah could eat. I had to bend the food restrictions a very tiny bit but not badly.
Overall, I think Sarah is doing marvelously with observing what others are doing and doing the same thing. When I observed for a few minutes at the end of preschool Monday and Wednesday, I saw her easily participating with the class for the game or activity. She answered questions when directly asked! She often picks up on what Amy is doing and does it too. In the SR room with me she has been doing lots of isming with pictures of flags. I have been joining approximately. This means I don’t do exactly what she does but I am still giving her space to do her thing and my activity is within the same theme. When she was playing exclusively with all of the flag pictures, I started drawing flags on the chalk board. After several minutes, she picked up some chalk and started coloring on the paper flags! Awesome. Little things like this happen all the time. Approximate joining feels like giving a sideways suggestion instead of a direct suggestion and often it works just as well if not better than a direct suggestion.
Leave a Reply