On a good day, parenting will test the integrity of your character. On a bad day, parenting will test your will to live. Parenting children with trauma histories will cause you to test the integrity of everything and everyone you thought you knew, for the rest of your life.
~J. Skrobisz

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Blogspot help please and a Conversation with Wonder Girl

I'm well versed in LiveJournal and Facebook but this Blogspot? not so much.

How do I get comments to my posts sent to my email inbox?
How do I reply to comments left on my posts?
Thanks.

For several months now, Wonder Girl has fallen asleep in our room, on our bed. Then we carry her to her room at night before we go to sleep. There were three reasons for this.
#1 - Sissy screamed every.single.night at bedtime and Wonder Girl didn't need to deal with that.
#2 - we don't have an extra room in our house so the girls couldn't have their own room*
#3 - Sissy was hurting Wonder Girl when we weren't looking, putting Wonder Girl into her own bed after Sissy went to sleep and waking them both up in the morning was our best option.

But now that Sissy is at the RTC and hopefully learning new bedtime habits and respect for others, we see a need to retrain Wonder Girl. This evening she and I discussed it after the aggravated Dad begged that we just let Wonder Girl sleep in our room anyway.

"Wonder Girl, do you remember the reasons you started sleeping in our room?"

"Yes. Sissy screams EVERY NIGHT! UGH!!!"

"Yes, that's true. But now that Sissy is getting help, when she comes home, she will probably be better about bedtime. Do you know what that means for you?"

"Yes. I won't have to hear her anymore!"

"Yes, but it also means you have to learn to sleep in your room too."

"Oh."

"What about a compromise? Every other night you can sleep on my bed, OK? And if that goes well, then we can work towards you sleeping in your room for two nights and then one night in my room? How does that sound?"

"It's a pattern, Mom!"

"So we have a deal?"

"DEAL!"

I can't count how many times I'd approach problem solving with Sissy the same way and how many times the outcome was Sissy screaming at the top of her lungs for an hour or more. It was strange for me to have a normal dialogue with Wonder Girl, reach an agreement to a problem we had and for her to be happy about it. I could feel my hackles rising and my nerves preparing for the anticipated screaming even though I knew in my mind that Wonder Girl doesn't have Sissy's issues.

Boy, it's going to be hard for me to retrain myself too!

*We only learned a few weeks ago in RAD therapy that RAD kids need their own rooms with an alarm on a door. This is one of the many reasons we weren't prepared for RAD therapy. The children only have privacy curtains for doors because the rages always included slammed, locked doors that got barricaded followed by an hour or more of unscrewing door knobs and pushing the door open. Thus the doors were removed. When Wonder Girl told us Sissy was hurting her, we put a baby monitor in the girls' room so we would always know what Sissy was doing while in there. Not perfect, but the best we had.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

We're all just doing the best we can. Our RADish sleeps in our room (we have a very big room). Recently she snuck out in the middle of the night (1 a.m.), went downstairs, stole food from the pantry, took it to the basement, then snuck OUT of the house to walk all the way around the house to throw the garbage away where we wouldn't find it. We woke up at 1 a.m. and she was gone! Now I have a door alarm on my own bedroom door. *sigh*

raidergirl3 said...

hi over here!
for comments - go to Settings, then Comments, there should be an option to enter the email you'd like to have comments sent to. It's near the bottom of the list. Let me know if that doesn't work.

Glad to hear that things are going as well as can be. That Wonder Girl is a real wonder.

The Accidental Mommy said...

Ok, I am not great at this so there might be a better way. I just go on to my blog and click on my own comments link and leave a comment. Confused me too at first!
I know what you mean about the arguing. Ugh. I have a constant mental ping pong game going. Is this worth it?/ Is this not worth it? Leave it go?/Jump on it asap? It does not help knowing there is a 90% chance of a meltdown before you even speak!No matter what you are going to say!

stellarparenting.com said...

our boys share, everyone told us not to and we have made it work. There is more supervision required and there has a been a lot of learning along the way. We make it work by
- their door is never closed, we have taken it off as well when needed
-once you have been put to bed you are silent, you are allowed one free pass to the bathroom, that's it.
- there are no toys in their room, not even stuffies, just books for reading at bedtime nothing else at all
- one of us stays outside their room (in office) until Fudge is asleep
- not remaining quiet when you are put to bed results in running laps/doing push ups etc. to get rid of your energy so you will be ready to sleep
We have talked about a baby monitor and may one day get one, especially if we have other kids in the house. Hope once she is home you can find a solution that works for you.

Brenda said...

The baby monitor is a great idea when they have to share a room. We had a lot of trouble with our getting up and running around the house during the night. They'd turn the computer on, play with the printer, get into deserts and about clean it out. A lot of it was so we'd see it, I think. Otherwise they wouldn't leave it all out in the open. Door alarms were helpful. There are also the motion detector alarms you could put above the door facing down.