$400 for 1 Hour of Therapy Consult!

I just want to cry. Most of this school year has been amazing. It's had it's bumps but for the most part (compared to a few years ago) things have been smooth sailing. Until about a week and a half ago when my son was due for his 5 year old shots. These are the same shots that he received the week before his seizure when he was 1 year old so I wanted to talk to the pediatrician about it. Even the pediatrician was a little nervous but felt that since he didn't start a fever until a week AFTER the shots it must have been a secondary infection. We agreed to do 1 shot at a time and come back in a few months for the next round. I was OK with that. BUT for the past week or so at school Dakoda has been having problems. His teacher said his eyes glass over and he becomes very withdrawn, distant, and out of character.....just like when he was 1 after his shots. I'm petrified. He's been feeling warm the past few days so my husband is stopping today to buy a thermometer to make sure he isn't starting to run fevers. Yesterday morning he was totally in a tantrum saying he hate school. I talked to his teacher about it and by the time I picked him up from school yesterday he was in the corner with pillows covering his face bawling. VERY out of character for him. All yesterday afternoon he was out of sorts. This morning he woke up from a dream about My Little Ponies and was LIVID that God hadn't teleported them into our backyard. It would almost be comical if it wasn't so sad. :( He went to school quite grumpy about it but I finally got him out of the house. When I went to pick him up from school today he was warm again and he had BIT someone at school. We haven't had this problem in more than 2 years, and the child he bit is the quietest most compliant kid ever. He's so shy and never fights with the other kids. I called the pediatrician today who wants to see him & is also sending us over to the behavioral therapist who is ULTRA expensive and doesn't accept insurance. BUT she is G.O.O.D.!  But at $400 an hour.....we don't have the money to pay for that but we don't have a choice  - we NEED help. We don't know where to go for it. Dakoda is SO freaking smart, he reads at a 2nd grade level yet he thinks flying ponies will come to see him (and not the robot kind he tells me). I just want to cry. I am TERRIFIED that this is starting all over again. I worked SO incredibly hard to get him where he is right now, I don't know if I can handle this huge of a setback.

Meltdowns over a Quarter & Attachment to a Pig

Well having Peach in the house has certainly made a big difference in such a short time. My son is absolutely ATTACHED to her. In fact we have to take timeouts from the pig to let the poor thing run around and play. I am hoping that having her will help to lessen meltdowns. Thankfully we only one really bad one about once a year. 

For example about a week before we got piggy we had a mini-meltdown at Aldi. I had used a quarter from the car to get the cart at Aldi and evidently that was Dakoda's "special" quarter. Well of course we ended up trading carts and long story short he did NOT get the same quarter out that we put in......oh heavens! This started a frantic hunt for the same quarter that we had used. We quickly hurried home and dumped out all of our piggy banks looking for the same quarter....after a few minutes thankfully we found one! Phew! But just trying to get him back in the car and home to look and pray that we had the same quarter was quite an adventure!

Meet Peach - Our Newest Member of the Family!

Meet Peach! Yes she's a pig, and no we're not crazy! This all started back....well....when we had our first son. When he was 2 years old we began to notice the incredible bonding when he played with animals. It was incredible to see the complete relaxation and 100% love when he came in contact with a loving animal. The intensity was staggering. Ever since I've been wanting a dog for him when he was older, but my husband really dislikes dogs so the past 2 years we have been trying to come up with a comparable alternative.

We already had 2 cats which were not friendly to kids so introducing another cat was not a good idea. Finally my husband mentioned a pig. I love animals and I'm up for just about anything but I was totally surprised that my husband, who grew up in the suburbs of Chicago would ever mention having a pig! At first I thought he was kidding!

Not only was he NOT kidding but he was so excited about it within a day we were driving an hour away to visit pigs. The first set we went to visit were well over 200 pounds and WAY too big for us. We do live in a subdivision after all! The next day we hit the jackpot. We found a wonderful family about an hour away who we had been talking with that had medium sized pigs, about the size of a medium sized dog. It was perfect and they were only $100. My husband told her all about our son and how we were looking for a pig to use as sort of a therapy for him (much like a therapy dog) and she offered us the runt of the litter from her very expensive breed for only $200 - down from $1000! It was a miniature pot belly pig who wouldn't get over 20 pounds full grown.

After playing and seeing more than 40 pigs my son had made an attachment with this little runt of a pig - unknowing about the lady's offer to take her home. It was amazing and perfect. She was sweet, docile, and so gentle. The boys held her in their laps the entire way home and have held her constantly for the past 2 days. My son is absolutely taken by this little piggy whom he named Peach. I can already see the tremendous difference in him and he now has the responsibility of feeding her as well as taking care of her litter box. 

Welcome to My World - Here is Our Story

Welcome to my world! It's exhausting, it's unique, and yet I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world (most of the time anyways!). Let me start back at the beginning. I met my husband in college and in 2004 we got married. By the summer of 2006 we were expecting a little boy named Dakoda and couldn't be happier. Life was incredible, invigorating, and there was something new around each corner. 

The morning sickness sucked but otherwise I just glowed throughout the pregnancy. Up until about the end of my 7th month that is. My blood pressure started going through the roof, I was swelling like Texas and I felt like crap. I was SO puffy I couldn't wear shoes and I could barely open my eyes. It hurt just to have someone touch me. I would bust out in tears if my husband put his hand on me because I hurt so bad. I went to triage two different times explaining that I was gaining 15-20 pounds a week and was completely bed-ridden. They just sent me home saying it was no big deal. Until the day my doctor sent me to the hospital because I had a "little protein in my urine". I was on Pitocin for 8 hours with NO contractions. Nope - not even one - at least not that I could feel! So the nurse sent some routine bloodwork down to the labs only to have the doctor practically run into my room saying "You're a very sick girl. You've very very sick." Well after a month of everyone telling me I was just fine I kind of blew him off. That's all he told me, and within 5 minutes I was put under general anesthesia and had an emergency c-section with a blood transfusion on stand by. Evidently I was in severe liver failure - HELLP syndrome I would later find out. A rare but potentially deadly pregnancy-induced issue for both mom and baby. Thankfully we were both fine and left the hospital 2 days later.

It was beautiful baby bliss. A few things surprised us....and the doctor....like my son rolling onto his side ever since he was born. I figured it was one of those odd things that he could do - every baby is different right?! 

By 3 months old he could put complete weight on his legs and stand up on my belly. Wait - 3 months old? Didn't I JUST have this baby? I figured as a new mommy I was just gloating in his accomplishments. By this point he was SO hungry he was drinking 60 ounces of milk a day - I had to switch him to formula. My pediatrician actually told me to stop feeding him. I only fed him when he screamed and he never threw it up. I figured he just LOVED his milk! 

By 4 months old - OH MY GOODNESS! He had 4 brand new baby teeth. This is when I began to wonder exactly HOW quickly he was growing. In the back of my mind nagged something about those with genetic defects who grow too quickly....he was in the 99% percentile all the time.....

By 6 months he was crawling. No wait - now he's walking! Crawling AND walking all at 6 months old. And I'm not just talking a step here or there - I'm talking about 20 steps. It was incredible. A part of me was completely amazed and totally proud of my "super-baby" and part of me was sad that I didn't have the cute cuddly baby who just happily laid in my arms. Once he started crawling he NEVER stopped. And it was terror in our household. Hah! We installed baby safety locks on everything. 

By 11 months old he could talk in COMPLETE sentences. NOW I KNOW there is something extremely extraordinary about my son. He would walk to the backdoor, unlock it and say "momma I want to play outside". At 11 months old! It was a shocked for those around us for certain! Safety locks, well, they didn't work anymore. My son by 11 months could now find the key to our deadbolt and walk out the front door. So we installed an alarm system. Also during this month he had EXTREME diarrhea. And I'm talking EXTREME. We were changing crib sheets and outfits at LEAST 10 times a day. There was so much of it it would spill out of the crib and down onto the floor. It wouldn't stay in a diaper, so I was constantly cleaning the house. He was getting such horrible rashes from the severe acid coming out his bum that he now had open bleeding sores so I switched to cloth diapers hoping to prevent the diapers from sticking to his sore bottom. This went on for 8 weeks. 8 weeks - I was exhausted and dehydrated, my son wasn't in good shape and he ended up needing to be hospitalized for several days until he could stop vomiting and having diarrhea. It was B.A.D. The doctors ran test after test and never found anything. Finally by day 3 he stopped and everything went back to normal again - except that he was terrified of the crib bars.

SO we took our 11 month old baby home and moved him into a toddler bed because he was terrified of the crib. I cannot stress to you how EXTREMELY difficult this was! We spent more than 6 months and 4+ hours every night trying to keep him in it. Oh, did I mention one of his newfound traits was stubborness?

He was a very stubborn child which seemed to have an extremely high pain tolerance. I figured it was just because he was a boy. At 18 months old I took him in for his shots - there were 5 or 6 of them all at once. I didn't think anything of it. He ran a high fever afterwards which I still didn't think anything of - he was VERY prone to spiking crazy high fevers and keeping them for weeks at a time so it didn't even phase us. We were quickly learning he was a bit different than our friend's kids. About a week and half after his shots he began a seizure - it lasted about 2 1/2 minutes and happened in the car as we were driving home. I had seizures as a child and tend to have an abnormally calm composure when serious things happen so I wasn't freaked out about it, but let's face it, he was my first baby and I hated that it was happening to us! 

The ER told us he had a febrile seizure due to an ear infection but when we took him to his pediatrician the next day he said there was no ear infection. I guess in all the chaos of it we never questioned it either way and was thankful he didn't have a second seizure. We didn't realize all of this until we looked back on it later. His pediatrician put him on allergy preventative medicines since he had severe allergies, croupe, and pneumonia on a pretty regular basis and attributed the fever to one of these things. This event in our son's life changed everything. Perhaps it did not actually cause what would come next, but it sure didn't help it! Up until this point our son was simply an extremely advanced child.

Although our son could still talk he became a ghost. When you looked in his eyes he wasn't there - it was scary and creepy all at once. You could just see the glaze cloud over his eyes. We used to wave right in front of his face and he never acknowledged we were there. And then somehow he would snap out of it and talk for a bit, then withdraw back into the ghost of a little boy. I was scared. Aside from his ability to converse in such an advanced manner my mind drifted to autism, but the pieces just didn't fit with his verbose vocabulary. My husband and I did the best we could with him although we were at a loss of what to do. This went on for about 6 months. I would never want to relive any of that. And then all of a sudden while we were out of town visiting family he bit his cousin - and chomped down pretty hard. It was a horrifying and humiliating experience....but little did I know it was just the beginning. That one bite turned into another bite and another bite and over a year of extreme biting with no apparent reason. Sure he would bite if he was angry, but he would also bite complete strangers and with no malicious intent. In fact many times he looked confused after he would bite someone ..... almost like he wasn't himself. No daycare or stay at home mom would agree to watch him. Our church even refused to allow us to drop him off for Sunday school. It was really bad. We stopped going to the parks, we stopped taking him to the grocery stores. It was the most humiliating thing I've ever experienced. In just one hour he would take a nice bite out of 7+ kids. It was crazy and I remember crying every day trying to figure out what was happening with our son. No one seemed to have an answer for us and we tried EVERYTHING.

About a year and a half later the biting seemed to slow down a bit, for a while, then it would start again. The most bizarre and maddening thing is, however, that the day we took him off of Zyrtec he NEVER bit again. After days, months, and more than a year of severe chronic biting on a daily basis (he would even bite us!) he immediately stopped when we took him off of the Zyrtec. That was a wake up call for us. I immediately pulled him off of all his allergy medicine and switched him to artificial dye-free everything. I was at my wits end and had no other options. He was still incredibly bright and far advanced over other children his age. During his biting episode at 22 months old I took him to Early Steps - a county program which offered therapy services to children with disabilities and social problems. Would you believe that they refused him any services because he was too smart. Even when I told him he had been kicked out of church and I could not find a daycare that would accept him because of his extreme lack of social skills they turned us down. He was almost 2 years ahead of his age in motor skills and fluency. 2 years. That put him at almost the age of a 4 year old in a 1 year old body. I knew he was smart, but that floored me.

Messes in our house were always big, blood pooling out of a busted mouth would go unnoticed, and my son ate the strangest things. Everything went in his mouth, including live bugs to eat, charcoal, trash, beads, and anything else that came across his path. Thankfully the biting had ceased, but taking him to the playground with other kids always put us on edge. He would frequently knock them over on accident, hug kids so hard they choked, and unintentionally end up hurting us somehow. My husband had a broken rib to prove it! We took him to a behavioral therapist to have him evaluated out of our own pocket because we needed help. It was VERY expensive but worth it. She confirmed that although too young to test he was definitely at least highly gifted - at almost 3 years above his age level. With his apparent lack of social skills she referred us to a licensed therapist for social skills therapy. 

Social skills therapy was absolutely the BEST thing we ever did for him. The first month was T.O.U.G.H. He loved going to "play group" but there were extreme issues with his ability to act appropriately with other children....and adults. After a month of circling the room and spitting at the instructor she made the observation that she thought he also had a sensory processing disorder. AH - HAH! Now that made sense! He was sensory seeking - and very much so! He was not afraid of heights and was an extreme daredevil. By 3 years old he rode on Tower of Terror...and loved it. Nothing frightened him....except for the ice cream man and the dark - both of which he was extremely terrified of. So much that he would shake in fright. After a few weeks in social skills therapy we immediately noticed the difference. The therapist was absolutely amazing. In just under 1 year he went from spitting and lashing out at every session to doing so well for 3 straight months that she told us he no longer needed her services. It was AMAZING. To have a child with extreme biting and autistic control issues to just a year or two later having a child who could cope with those around him (at least most of the time) - it just brings me to tears thinking of the extreme difference.

We took him to an occupational therapist and had a SIPT test done - a special sensory-certified test. Of course it costs a good deal of money but we were on the right track and we were determined to help him. It confirmed what we had thought all along, but at 4 years old it also showed us that he was almost 1 year and a half behind in his fine motor skills. He couldn't draw a straight line or even barely hold scissors. So we did OT for about 6 months and what a transformation! Our son was quickly turning into a magnificent child compared to his earlier years. Now he is in a part time K-4 program and on a 2nd grade reading level (self-taught of course). He is constantly amazing us with his observations but we are understanding him better. He tests off the charts for Asperger's as well - but the social skills therapy has greatly helped with that. In fact unless you observe him for a period of time with other children you don't peg him as anything different than the average child. We still have extreme meltdowns, but only about once every 6-10 months. We are learning about him and he is learning about himself. Although we can't afford therapy any more at this time he has made an amazing transformation. I am constantly on the drive for anything that can help us help him here at home.

This is my oldest. When he was 2 years old we had another little boy named Landon. SO much happened during the short span of Dakoda's younger years I couldn't possibly put all of it here. When I gave birth to Landon we were a little nervous as to what it would bring us, but he was a perfect beautiful little boy. Happy and cuddly - just what I'd always wanted! But at 2 months old he started pooping only every 3-4 weeks. It was bizarre, but his doctor said that sometimes it happens. By 4 months old he had lost so much weight, was dropping diaper and clothes sizes, and could barely pick his arms up off of the crib bed so I rushed him to the doctor. When you see your child every day you don't notice the gradual changes. For the past 2 months he had been EXTREMELY irritable - screaming about 20 hours of each day. He didn't nap. My husband and I were at wits end. I couldn't walk to the bathroom to pee because he would scream. I fell asleep pushing his swing....all while he was screaming. I couldn't even handle taking him in the car anymore. In our exhaustion we figured he was just colicky....until he started becoming lethargic and dropping weight. The doctor completely freaked out and ran conglomerates of tests. He was talking about kidney failure and cystic fibrosis - all sorts of things no parent wants to hear. We took him for blood work and it was so difficult to get a proper blood draw it took us 6 straight hours - it was HELL. We were beginning to wonder what we had gotten ourselves into! I just wanted my sweet baby to feel better again. It turns out that he had a reoccurring urinary tract infection due to a defect. It was such a simple fix. He's been on a daily antibiotic for the past 2 years now and not had any more problems. My sweet Landon is the cuddly child I always wanted, but he is also stubborn and independent like his older brother Dakoda. 

They both make crazy messes together and I love them both with all of my heart. This blog is to help relieve my exhaustion and stress from raising two wonderful, creative, intelligent, chaotic crazy boys! Our house is a mess, sometimes there is a hole in the wall, and we have jungle gyms and hanging swings galore - both inside and out, but it's our life and we love it! (most of the time!!)