Welcome!

Welcome to our blog.  If you want to know who we are, click the Us tab at the top.  It will tell you a little about us (that's why I named that tab Us).  There are some other tabs up there too, some still in development...because if you can understand what those abbreviations mean, you'll understand that computer time to work on blogging is a precious commodity.  Buried within those tabs will be more pages; I will be getting a workout hyperlinking on this blog.  And given my past experience with blogger formatting, there may be some not-so-nice words involved in this process.  Yet another reason that blogging can only be done after bedtime.

If you are reading this blog and don't know us personally, I'll tell you a little about us (although I'd prefer that you'd just click on the Us tab and save me the trouble).  And then I'll ask you how you found this blog if you don't know us because I tried to set it up so you can't randomly find us.  But maybe someone else told you to come over here and read our blog.  But if that's true, you might want to question your friendship with them, because they may be telling you that your kid needs help like mine does.  Hopefully they are supportive friends like I have.  Which brings me to another point in my ramblings....I have enabled comment moderation on this blog.  That means I'm only publishing comments that are supportive and uplifting.  That's one of my resolutions in our new life - I will surround myself with uplifting and encouraging people.  Life is too short to be brought down by others....short is also what my FB friends list is now that I've trimmed out the less-than-supportive people.

I will also not be censoring material on this blog.  I'm going to try to censor personal information that would identify us but I won't censor the actual nitty-gritty of our lives.  That means there may be things on here that you disagree with, don't want to hear, or might upset you.  Please remember, I don't force you to read this.  If you look at the upper left corner of your screen (not at the blog, look at the screen), you will see a "back" button.  It gets you out of here quick.  So does the x inside the box on the upper righthand corner.

Okay, back to Us.  I'm a single mom of an extremely amazing almost 5-yr-old (calling her Mariposa).  Unfortunately, my child and I are polar opposites and have deemed it our mission in life to butt heads about everything.  Okay, not really.  But yeah, sort of really.  One of my coming posts will be about the definition of extroverts vs. introverts - it pretty much sums up our life.  Recently, I have watched my brilliant (no really, she is) exuberant child start to crumble.  I've watched her self-esteem tank, I've watched her grow angry and frustrated over the simplest tasks, I've watched the joy drain out of her as she struggled daily to be the awesome kid that was being smothered inside her.  I ran the gamut of parental worries (#1 - what the heck had I done to my child to make her fall apart?) from neuro disorders to attachment disorder to malaria (okay, okay, okay - I knew she didn't have malaria).  I finally took a huge step and humbly (it is very humbling to speak up and say "I feel like a crappy parent. HELP!!") asked my pediatrician for help.  I love our pediatrician and within a week we were seeing a developmental pediatrician who also managed to get us in, same day, with an occupational therapist.  I'll get into the minute details of these visits (again, some of this is in the tabs above, and some will be soon) in coming posts but the short version of this is that my precious girl has severe ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and SPD (sensory processing disorder).  We have a game plan to move forward, we are already seeing incredibly miraculous positive changes in our lives, and we are finally on the same page (mother and child, that is) as to expectations and goals.

So that's what this blog is about.  It's about learning to be more than a diagnosis (or 2 or 3).  It's about utilizing tools and gameplans to rise above.  It's about learning what wings are and how to work with them.  It's about taking the most amazing caterpillar and helping her figure out how to become a soaring butterfly.