I haven't posted much about this, but J has some major sleep issues. Almost every night since he was born he has woken up at least once a night for something. He starts out in his room and at some point he wakes up and either tries to get in bed with us, lays in the hallway, turns on his light and plays or screams until one of us goes in there. After much deliberation and talking to his pediatrician we saw a child psychologist the other day and got some advice on how to deal with it. While in the room he went through every single toy she had within 30 minutes. He was very deliberate in pulling things out one at a time, playing for 20 seconds and then promptly putting it away and getting out something else. After about 10 minutes she asked me if he always plays like this and of course the answer is yes. He has very little attention span which is one of the main reasons we finally went to see her. His teacher mentioned that she was having trouble getting him to sit and do any sort of school work, story time or group activity. This wasn't a surprise to me since I myself had stopped taking him to library storytimes a long time ago because it wasn't worth fighting him the whole time to get him to sit still. Long story short, my child has some serious attention issues. And some sleep issues. She gave us some things to work on and we go back in a month to see if we've made any progress. Last night went ok. If he does well tonight he gets a reward tomorrow. A friend of mine has a son who is a few years older and has some similar issues and she gave me some great advice. We'll be working really hard on things when we get back from our trip, but I hate to start too much and then we leave for 10 days and have to start all over again. Right now we're just working on getting him to stay in his room until morning. When we get home we'll work more on the behavior and attention problems. I have some hope that maybe if he starts sleeping better then his behavior will improve some too. It can't hurt.
Next week our summer schedule officially starts! T-ball on Saturdays and Tuesday nights, dance on Wednesday, Mom's Day Out and rock climbing on Thursdays. Monday and Friday we'll be at the Y doing toddler time with some friends. Obviously Sunday will be our only day "off" during the summer this year. In the past, summer has been a time to relax and have no schedule but it seems the older the kids get, the less relaxing we do during the summer. I'm really looking forward to hanging out on the driveway until way past bedtime having fun with our friends though. We had a nice preview of summer the other day and we let the kids get out the water toys and play. It was like they hadn't seen water since, well, September. It was fabulous. There's nothing that says summer quite like a lawn chair on the driveway, kids playing in the water and a Sonic cup in hand. At least around here that's how we do things.
No comments:
Post a Comment