Parenting Stuff

I took all the kids to the doc­tor last Thurs­day. G has gained 11 lbs. and is back at a nor­mal weight for her age and height, which was good news. R has not lost any weight, but he’s got­ten much taller with­out gain­ing any weight, so he’s much thin­ner than he should be. The doc­tor did some blood work, all of which came back nor­mal, and I need to take him back to have more blood drawn for a thy­roid pan­el, too. 

He needs to put on about 25 lbs., though, so we’ve got him drink­ing Boost shakes with every meal. He is the only male teen I have ever encoun­tered who is such a picky eater that he’ll just not eat if we don’t have exact­ly what he wants on the table. I make allowances for the fact that my broth­er and all of his friends were jocks and descend­ed on food like locusts on a field at har­vest time, and R is extreme­ly seden­tary. Still, he’s not eat­ing as much as he needs to eat. I’ve had trou­ble find­ing the kind of oat­meal he likes (Quak­er Apple & Cin­na­mon) late­ly and found some Fri­day. He respond­ed by imme­di­ate­ly sit­ting down and eat­ing a HUGE bowl—seven pack­ets! That was good, but I have to won­der what will hap­pen if that stuff goes off the market.

And the boy is offi­cial­ly taller than me. I’ve been try­ing to avoid acknowl­edg­ing that, but he is now 5′ 9 3/4″. I’m right at 5′9″. GAH!

Katie is right on track. And way too damned pret­ty for my com­fort. I mean, I’m hap­py that my child is beau­ti­ful and healthy—but I’m also just not ready for her to be so grown up.

We had a very rough evening with G. She gets upset about some­thing and then works her­self up more and more until she’s hys­ter­i­cal over a rel­a­tive­ly minor issue. That scares me, hon­est­ly. That kind of out-of-bounds reac­tion is too typ­i­cal of BPD. Right now we’re just try­ing to work with her on under­stand­ing that she is doing this to her­self, that she can stop doing it, and that she needs to do so. Katie and R both got very upset because she was so hys­ter­i­cal, so they had to be calmed down, too.

While writ­ing this post I received an email mes­sage from the UU home­school­ing list with a link to an inter­est­ing arti­cle, Teach­ing Timid­i­ty to Kids. It’s good, and it’s right on, and I do not want to raise bub­ble chil­dren. As much as part of me wants to hold on to my baby girl, Katie has to learn to deal with being a beau­ti­ful per­son who is con­sid­ered high­ly attrac­tive in our soci­ety, and how she’ll like­ly be treat­ed as a result (good and bad). G has to learn to deal with her emo­tions and reg­u­late her own behav­ior in the long run. R has to learn to eat enough to keep him healthy, whether he can get exact­ly what he wants or not. Every­body has to learn to own his/her own feel­ings and let go of try­ing to “fix” any­body else. Of course, help­ing them to learn all that while keep­ing them rea­son­ably safe and healthy so that they sur­vive to ben­e­fit from the lessons is the hard part.

I’m find­ing it very annoy­ing that I did­n’t ask god­dessin­ga to take an updat­ed pic­ture of me and sam­bear togeth­er this week­end. Dangit.

I’m very, very sleepy—bed now.