“You know what’s wrong with me?” I asked Super Dad. It was a loaded question, and Super Dad, being the loving diplomat that he is, humored me with a “nothing’s wrong with you, dear”. “My adrenal glands are depleted,” I retorted.

“Actually I think it’s just spring allergies,” he answered. My complaints had been how tired and sluggish I’ve felt and a myriad of peri-menopausal symptoms – sweating, acne, confused thinking, dizziness. I’m not pleased with how this middle age thing is going.

My impetus for this thinking was listening... more

Our nine year old child is going through the stage of flexing her independence muscles and she’s about to drive me crazy. She has been doing the opposite of just about everything I have asked her to do at home and now it’s happening at school as well. She’s in the fourth grade and as a part of a disciplinary measure she was sent to the lunch room, during the third grade lunch period, for supervision.

Well, I’m sure you can just imagine how embarrassing it would be for a fourth grader to have to eat lunch with a bunch of third graders. So,... more

LuLu’s trauma therapists have been using a variety of interventions and techniques with her. She is very open to all these “tools”. We have done some heavy-hitting things like EMDR and neurofeedback. We have also done psychodrama and visualization.

When LuLu was younger, less verbal, and because her trauma was pre-verbal, we had to use lots of experiential therapies. These days, LuLu is drawn to the visualization techniques. Last week we worked squarely on re-framing.

Very simply, re-framing something is putting it in a different... more

Julia, my blog-mate, wrote last week about how allergies can mimic other disorders. She and I chatted briefly about the different types of antibodies and the type of testing LuLu had undergone to determine her food sensitivities. Julia reminded me I had never blogged about this.

Antibodies are made of proteins called immunoglobulins. There are five classes of immunoglobulins: IgG, IgA, IgM, IgD and IgE. Most of the antibodies in your blood... more

Are you worried about your child wetting the bed? Primary nocturnal enuresis is the most common form of bedwetting. Between five and seven million children in the United States, over the age of six years, wet their beds every night. However, research indicates less than two percent of children will still wet the bed once they reach puberty, or the age of fifteen years. Children under the age of five years will wet their beds as a part of their normal development.

Boys... more

"Genes load the gun, but environment pulls the trigger,"

So says Craig Newschaffer, chairman of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Drexel University School of Public Health in the April 2007 article, Autism: It’s Not Just in the Head. Newschaffer is just one of many doctors and scientists who believe that there is much more to autism than just the symptoms that appear to be brain-based.

For some time now, since Bernard... more

Tomorrow we visit LuLu’s trauma therapists again. She is chatting about it non-stop. It never ceases to amaze me that they come up with something that helps her; some tool she can use as she tries to self-regulate or re-frame her past and ultimately her view of the world.

We have a long association with these therapists, who specialize in attachment and trauma therapies. We have not seen them on a “regular” basis, the way one often thinks about therapy. But instead, have sought them out at various junctures of LuLu’s development, times when she’s needed... more

The seventeen year drove his motorcycle to a performance he was in this evening, the teen girls convinced him he should be an actor in this play, and he was like a poor innocent animal being led to slaughter when he succumbed to their begging. He has put in probably a hundred hours of practice for this production, which is fine. Since we homeschool I just gave him credit for a drama class. Then I took the rest of the children to see the play, as a school field trip, and we all really enjoyed it, including the baby who surprisingly stared with wide eyed interest throughout the... more

Dear Abby dedicated an entire column this week to Convergence Insufficiency Disorder which is a legitimate, problematic binocular dysfunction. It is a reading disorder where the eyes drift too much inward or outward when trying to focus to read, which in turn causes eye strain making it very difficult to study. Apparently people with this disorder have to reread the same line of words and frequently loose their place because the words seem to jump or float across the page while they are trying to read. The psychological... more

The effects of secondhand smoke on young children are not temporary nor are the effects reversible. The American Heart Association estimates that 37,000 to 40,000 people die each year from heart and blood vessel disease caused by secondhand smoke. Infants and children who are exposed to tobacco... more