Category Archives: Executive Function
Spring Break?
This week is Spring Break for the girls, which is sort of like a vacation for me too. The treadmill slows down a bit. I don’t have to crack the whip and get Lily out the door to school at the break of dawn. I don’t have to worry so much about getting homework done every night. But I am still concerned that there’s schoolwork she’s supposed to be working on this week. She doesn’t think she does, but you never know. Plus, I feel like she must still have makeup work to do from her sick days 2 weeks ago.
Lily stayed home from school 3 days because she was sick. Of course, I was instantly worried about her falling behind in school. I emailed her teachers to get her assignments and then I looked in her backpack. Big mistake.
Of course, the backpack is stuffed full because she brings EVERYTHING home EVERY night, so she won’t forget anything. But there’s also a big, messy stack of loose papers in there and that makes me wonder which ones are assignments past due because she forgot to turn them in and which ones are assignments she’s supposed to be working on, but has forgotten about. I need to sit down and go through it with her. She told me she thought she was caught up, but the online parent portal still has her missing assignments. Lily doesn’t really seem to know.
That’s one of the hardest part of helping her. I want to be able to prompt her and support her in remembering until she learns and develops the Executive Function skills to do that herself, but I never really know what’s going on with her school assignments and neither does she. We–Lily, the school and I, have just not been able to come up with a system yet that works for her. She gets frustrated and discouraged because organizational systems are imposed on her and they don’t seem to work. She also feels that accepting help and using tools to support her organization means that people are once again trying to ‘fix’ her.
Of course, she has the same planner that all her classmates have, but it’s blank. Lily hates writing in it. I think that’s pretty common with these kinds of kids. She tries to keep it all in her head. I try to encourage her to use Google calendar or other digital tools, since I’m guessing that’s what she’ll use eventually, but nothing has worked so far.
It’s hard to scaffold the support of her Executive Functioning at school when we don’t have a system in place. I suppose it takes trial and error, after all, there are adults who have yet to find an ideal system. But I think this piece of her twice exceptional school career is going to be huge for her.
Next week is Lily’s annual IEP review meeting. I’m supposed to bring my thoughts on her goals for next year. Organization is at the top of my list. After her success in 6th grade this year, we know that she’s learning. Her scores on the acuity tests that predict her performance on state assessment tests increased dramatically this year. She’s getting very good scores on her quizzes and tests in class. But she’s still struggling and doing poorly getting assignments turned in. That’s hard to watch when I know that she has really learned the material.
Next year, the demands on Lily’s Executive Functioning skills are only going to increase and that has me concerned. She’s going to need more support and scaffolding to be successful and that’s what I hope to address at next week’s IEP meeting.
Peanut Butter in the Bathtub
Living with a twice exceptional kid who has ADHD & Executive Functioning difficulties means that many times the final step of any process is never completed. Toilet is never flushed. Bath never drained. Milk sitting out. Medicine bottles without lids. This gets more exaggerated when Lily has a friend over.
Lily doesn’t have a lot of close friends. Her best friend moved away when she was 2nd grade and she still hasn’t gotten over it. Her old BFF was the perfect partner for Lily—calm, organized and wise. Lily hasn’t found anyone to take her place. But there’s a girl who lives nearby who often asks Lily to play.
She is similar to Lily in some ways… she can be unfocused, but is very creative. I like that they play in an age-appropriate, creative, imaginative way. It’s never about boys, clothes, makeup or cell phones. They climb trees, ice skate, build forts and invent craft projects.
This girl spent the night recently and the two of them made a path through the house, strewn with their creative projects, which I only discovered later. I was out of the picture because I tweaked my back earlier in the day and was stuck laying down, waiting out the muscle spasms. Little did I know what was going on upstairs. I should have guessed.
The next morning, I was bummed to see that it looked like a tornado had gone through the house. The dining room table was covered with their art project that involved a hot glue gun, toothpicks and paint. They had made pancakes and there was pool of syrup in the microwave, a plate of half-eaten pancakes on the floor, and a glass of syrup stuck to the stovetop. There were costumes all over the living room floor and in the office, tape, scissors and glue sticks were spilled out of a drawer. The final straw came when I went to take a bath, which I thought would be easier on my back, and found a ring of something disgusting in the tub. Turns out it was peanut butter. Of course.
The girls apparently had a ‘spa’ in the bathroom. Their crusty bowl of peanut butter and chocolate was still on the bathroom counter.
On one hand, I admire their creativity, but on the other, I was furious The house was spotless 2 days ago, because I splurged and had a cleaning person come in. Now, it was trashed again.
Not that she doesn’t make messes constantly anyway, but when Lily has a friend over, she becomes so focused on playing that she thinks of nothing else. She doesn’t stop to think things through. Lily was so pre-occupied with having fun with her friend that it didn’t occur to her that giving each other peanut butter-chocolate facials was probably not such a good idea. Cleaning up her messes doesn’t even cross her mind.
I brought this up with Dr. K in our session with him this week. As soon as I started, Lily began to get angry and defensive. Dr. K stopped her and asked her to listen to what I had to say without getting emotional. They’ve been working on this a lot lately and Lily is getting much better at controlling her emotional response to criticism.
Dr. K tells her to put a ‘mellow bubble’ around herself when she listens. He also tells her she has to learn that it’s okay for people to get upset with her when she makes mistakes. If she doesn’t use the tools she has and makes a mistake that affects other people, they will get upset with her and she needs to apologize and try to do better next time. All good lessons for ADHD folks, who sometimes go through life with people upset with them for being late, forgetting things and making messes.
As far as the slumber party mess-making, Dr. K reminded Lily about one of his mantras for ADHD kids.. DO IT NOW. I think Lily usually intends to clean up her messes ‘later’ but then she forgets.
His other advice for ADHD kids—SAME WAY EVERY TIME, an attempt to create routine and reduce forgetfulness.
It was a great discussion and Lily is making huge strides in controlling her emotions, but I don’t think there’s an end to the mess-making anytime soon.
Long Time-No Post
I knew this would happen. Events, evaluations and emails about my twice exceptional daughters fly back and forth so fast between me and both schools that I can barely keep up, let alone blog about them.
Just getting Lily clothed and fed is a major undertaking, never mind helping her keep up with school. But school seems to be going well lately. More on that later.
When I told her tonight that I want to start writing the Brainhugger Blog again, she said, “Why, because I make interesting fusses about things that you want to tell people about?” Well, yes.
Shower Power
I’m sitting here at the computer and keep hearing an alarm going off. I can’t figure out what that beeping noise is. Lily opens the bathroom door, damp, wrapped in a towel, carrying her alarm clock. She turns it off. I ask her why the alarm was beeping. She tells me breezily that she set an alarm for herself, so she’d know to get out of the shower in 20 minutes. She skips her naked, skinny self out of the room. It takes me a second to absorb what she just said. I replay it a couple of times in my head.
Only certain people will know why that little scene is completely amazing. I didn’t have to remind my twice exceptional ADHD daughter that it was time to get in the shower–7 times. I didn’t have to make my voice sound sharp the 7th time in order to spur her into action. I didn’t have to poke my head in the bathroom door and tell her that it was time to get out–3 times and 45 minutes later. I didn’t have to finally go in the bathroom, push the shower curtain aside and find her squatting on the shower floor, captivated by how the water runs down the drain. I didn’t have to remind her again that she needs to get out, so she’s startled out of her zen world of water rivulets and insists that she WAS getting out.
No, she brought her alarm clock down to the bathroom, set her alarm, got in the shower, washed herself, got out of the shower and dried off, before her alarm went off—all on her own.
How did that just happen? Did her frontal lobe just suddenly have a growth spurt. I have this strange feeling, like this weird recognition of a foreign world.
When you live with a kid like this, sometimes you don’t realize how much different daily life is. You just know that it’s hard. What? You mean, other parents don’t have to tell their kids the exact steps required for a task 20 times and then follow up to make sure that they’re actually starting the steps, continuing the steps and completing the steps?
As far as the magical shower alarm incident goes, my mind wonders if that’s how ‘normal’ kids act. Is that how much easier things are for the parents of ‘normal’ kids? Wow, it feels so light and airy and effortless. She has the idea that she should take a shower, she plans the steps and completes the steps, ALL BY HERSELF? I want some more of that. I’m still replaying it in my mind and I’m amazed by the ease of it. I don’t want to let it go, I guess because I know that moments like that are, right now at least, a special treat.
Brainhugger 