My Kids’ Family

After sagas of the past few weeks (to be written about here soon) I am going back to work again today and the only thing that came to mind was “Manic Monday” by The Bangles. Of course the song is about a woman wanting to be back with her man rather than going to work, but the sentiment of not wanting to be at work on Monday morning is totally the same.

In my case, I just want to be back at home with my son helping him to get through his days, but instead, I need to be at work. So in many ways my life parallels this song.

Here is a version from youtube that is called an acoustic version. It is only partially acoustic, as there is one electric guitar and a keyboard, but it is very nice nontheless.

Enjoy!

Now that the seders are over, I can get back to writing more frequently. I will post about our seders tomorrow, but today I want to concentrate on Avi and ADHD.

School has been a nightmare.  He is basically doing nothing but coloring in his Hebrew class and in English he seems to stay with the class some of the time, but the rest he just tunes out.  It is likely that next year we will move him to our local public school rather than the Jewish Day school, but until then it will be a battle.

Avi had started on 10 mg of Focalin initially, and we he was quickly moved to 10 mg of Adderall. That seemed to work for a while, but he started to get worse. In the early part of the day he seems to be ok, but by afternoon forget it.

So we moved him to 20 mg of Adderall, and he stayed on that for a few weeks, but then we started to see different behavior. He became withdrawn and moody. We felt that the 20 mg was too much. So now he is taking 15 mg. Until we get the new perscription, I am actually opening up the capsules and “eyeballing” 3/4 and then putting that back in the capsule. It takes a few days until we see results and this is school vacation week, so we may not really get results until he is on this dosage for a few days.  We are hopeful.

One side effect has been loss of appetite, but hopefully with the lower dose, he will start eating more.  That is the problem with these medicines.  It is all trial and error.  The hope is that eventually you will fine the right dosage and that he will be able to function a bit better.

Thats all for now.  I hope to have better news to report as we move forward.

Avi went to the neurologist today and we are going to try to up his Adderall doesage.  We’ll do that for a few weeks and see what happens.  I hope it helps, as Avi i starting to shut down in many ways.  When he gets in a situation where he cannot control what is happening, or he is feeling frustrated he either lashes out or he just shuts down.  So at school he is beginning to just refuse to do some things.

He has always loved working on the computers at school.  Out school as a great program where they do some learning on the computers.  The system is somewhat adaptive so it gets more challenging as the kids go farther.  Now that Avi has hit a point where it is more difficult for him, he just does not want to use the computers anymore.  There are lot of other examples.

We know that the meds are not a cure.  He is not going to just turn around and start doing the things he has stopped doing.  But hopefully he will be better able to focus on everything around him and then he might be able to start tolerating the things that frustrate him.

Sometimes it seems like a vicious circle, I hope we find an off ramp soon.

I did not want to go two days without writing in my blog so here is a quick post. The past few days have been difficult for Avi. On Friday, Monday and Tuesday he caused enough trouble in class that his teacher called us on Tuesday afternoon. On Saturday in Synagogue he threw a ball at someone and today he was sent to the principal’s office for biting someone.

We had a meeting on Monday with Avi’s therapist and we have the beginnings of a plan and direction, but I know that it will take time. I wish I could see a light at the end of the tunnel, but who knows. We will be speaking with the neurologist soon to discuss his meds and maybe that will help?

Only time will tell.

Avi had a very difficult day on Saturday.  We went to Synagogue like we do every Saturday morning.  Usually Avi, Shayna and I go earlier and mkm and Noam come a bit later.  Our Synagogue has a lot of age appropriate programs for kids on Saturday morning as we have a lot of young families, but Avi has never really wanted to go.  We have learned to let him be in this case, and generally he either sits with me in services, or he just plays by himself nicely (or sometimes not so nicely) in the hallyway.  This time, though, he had brought a ball with him and at some point started throwing it around and he hit a couple of people.

In the end, as soon as mkm got there, I had to take Avi home.  I think it was the first time I had to take him home from Synagogue, but it does remind us that the medication is not a cure-all.  It helps him to focus and cope better, but it does not make him a different person.

From now on, I cannot leave him unsupervised no matter what I or mkm have to give up and we will have to work with this for now.

Sunday came along, and here was a totally different Avi.  We were back at our Synagogue for our Purim Carnival.  Unfortunately due to the fire last year, the carnival was in a different room from usual and Avi did not want to go downstairs to the room.  So he stayed upstairs helping different people doing some things in the Synagogue.  He was such a good boy and in no way resembled the Avi from Saturday.

We just have to take it day by day and hope that the good days outnumber the difficult ones.

No time to really write today. The megillah reading last night was a lot of fun. Probably close to 75 kids (plus adults)! Very noisy but a great time. Today I am cooking for guests coming for lunch tomorrow, so I will just post photos of the kids in their costumes. Sorry no song of the day. Maybe I will make it up somehow next week.