One thing about parenting special kids seems to elude me. That’s the uncanny ability of other special parents to be able to play detective and actually figure out what is causing a change in their children’s behaviors.

For years I’ve had professionals tell me that there must be a detectible “cause” to a change in LuLu’s behavior. While on the surface I agree (it makes logical sense to me), I have struggled with finding the cause in most cases. It is starting to give me an inferiority complex. Over the years I’ve gotten a bit better and narrowed my detective options to things that affect her neurology as opposed to looking psychologically first. Things like anniversary date reactions or her dad traveling out of town or even wanting to “pay me back” for time I spend away from her used to be the main “suspects” for a change in behaviors. Although it is possible that any those are partially to blame of certain behaviors, all too often I’ve realized that it is some subtle shift in biochemistry or some neurologically based change that is more likely to be the culprit.

So, here I am again. Over the course of the last 10 days or so, LuLu’s behavior has “tanked”. Special parents know exactly what I mean. It’s that same ol’ roller coaster and she's just plummeted to the bottom. It is incredibly hard not to jump on board with the kid and ride it as it falls. My gut reaction is always "oh, no, here we go again!!!!" But, if I don’t join her, I get to see, like I did this time, that her plummeting ride isn’t dipping quite as low as in the past and that her ascent back to the top is a little bit faster and higher. Overall, even when she’s “tanking” she ain’t tanking as bad as she used to! (How’s that for being the eternal optimist.)

Being assigned the task of super sleuth (along with pharmacist, tutor, therapist, taxi driver, researcher and countless other tasks), I began forming hypotheses as to why she had hit this stumbling block. I called all her doctors and left my hypotheses on their answering machines and emailed the list to my closest “special parent” friends. I read it to LuLu’s OT this afternoon, who quickly recognized some of the symptoms as being related to The Listening Program and recommended we drop to only one 15-min session per day and start back on the Sensory Integration CD of TLP for some additional calming effects.

So, I took that advice and am monitoring to see what happens next. The other tricky part of playing super sleuth is to fight the urge to change more than one thing at a time. If we suspect it’s TLP (the only new thing that’s been added lately), then changing it must be the only thing we do for a few days. One of my other hypotheses involves medications, but making med changes at the same time would only leave us wondering which change brought about any positive or negative response we get.

And so it goes. Life is better around here when I’m disciplined enough to keep a paper trail on daily behaviors and adjustments. I must confess that most days I do not do this! But when I do, the patterns are clearer, and the improvements are much easier to see. The sleuthing is simpler.

For this time anyway, I’m staying off the roller coaster, but watching its every twist and turn! And I know I'll ultimately find the culprit...or maybe I won't...but there's always next time!