For the love of God! When will this child sleep?! **A Repost From Way Back! Because His Butt Still Don’t Sleep!**

The first night he was born, the nurses kept bringing Ronan into my room.

“He won’t stop crying.  Sorry, hon.  Maybe you should try to nurse him again.”

This went on only every ten minutes or so, until I just said, “Oh, alright already!  Just sleep in my bed with me!”

Thus began a new circle of life for Mami, parent of “The Baby Who Never Sleeps.”

Ditties (the nickname for my boobies), sleep.  Remove ditties, wake up.  Ditties, sleep.  Remove ditties, wake up…and on and on and on.  This lovely cycle was broken up by intermittent hours of filming infant Ronan with one of those old clunky cassette video recorders propped up on the couch at various times in the a.m., when only bats, owls, and other nocturnal animals roam the earth.

I began to look like one of them.  My eyes were black-rimmed.  I was in a zombie-like daze, walking into walls and forgetting proper hygiene (like actually washing myself), and I was obsessed with finding ways to get him to actually sleep without being attached to the ditty.

The Ferber Method = cry until vomit, then cry more.  Never stop crying.  Vomit.  Cry.

Daddy walking and rocking, then slipping Ronan quietly into his crib = bolting upright in 0.001 second flat.  Screaming. Vomiting.

The No Cry Sleep Solution = Ha Ha Ha Ha, yeah right.

For two years, I just caved and gave the ditty.  I learned how to sleep like a fugitive in an escape tunnel, one arm had to curl around the top of his head.  Ditty had to be fully accessible.  Pillows were aplenty, and positioned just so, to support my frozen frame.  As long as I didn’t move – at all – Ronan would sleep, nurse, sleep, nurse, and maybe some nights, he wouldn’t wake up for his 4-hour a.m. stretch.

When I finally decided to wean him (at over 2 years old – that’s another post in itself), a new cycle began in the life of Mami.

It was called, “The Child Who Never Sleeps”

Snuggle with Ronan in his bed until he falls asleep.  Wrench your body out from under his digging feet at 1 cm per hour.  Finally get out of the bed.  Lay in your own bed.  Roll over to finally sleep and immediately see a small figure hovering over you.

Walk back into child’s room.  Repeat.  4 nights out of the week, shoot footage of owl child awake with brand new fancy digital camcorder.

Flash 5 years forward, and I am still walking Nosferatu back and forth to his bed.  Still a zombie.

Everything from melatonin, vigorous exercise, magnesium, joint compression, and a trillion other things have been tried.

I have pretty much resigned myself to the idea of being an old, crabby, gray zombie.  Then we’ll call him …

“The Man Who Never Sleeps”

Feel free to send me your suggestions, please, for the love of GOD!

P.S. Don’t let this picture fool you!  I tried to trick him up by putting his little brother beside him to snuggle…maybe they’ll find comfort cuddling each other, and he won’t come looking for me!

Yeah, right.  5 minutes after I took this picture, he was hovering over me…THE CHILD WHO NEVER SLEEPS!!!!!

Ronan Art of the Day

My boo is doing some really cool digital art lately…

He entitled this “Squeaky Ball”

He’s cool.

THE SHAWL…THE DAMN SHAWL AGAIN

Every time I think I am going through a ridiculously rough period in life, I have to break out the big guns.  Tonight, my friends, I will be reading this for the umpteenth time…

Read it and weep only when you are having a REALLY bad night.  You’ll be reminded of what crappy life circumstances truly are.

And then, maybe you will slap yo’self in the face, like Mama do, for all your poor-me whining.

The Ronan of the Day

Ronan James nursed forever. In fact, so long that Mama was able to give speech lessons using this incredible motivator!

“I want boobies, what?”

“I want boobies, pweese!”

He has never lost the love for the boob.

When The Loudon was born, Ronan looked on longingly as he nursed, but since Ro was done, he settled for a “reach in and grab a handful” approach.

Ever since, we have had an almost daily discussion on “privates” and what is appropriate touching or not.

He is very sneaky about it now, and it’s turned into a seemingly harmless hand or finger graze across the chest area!! lol

Mama doesn’t want to make too big a deal of it, because I don’t want him to get some sort of “boob aversion.”  I can just imagine that this would turn him into that pervy groping kid from Jr. High School that you avoided with all of your might, because he just couldn’t control himself around the melons that have been suddenly popping up everywhere!!

So, when he grabbed a handful the other day, Mama did the “privates talk” walk through.

Ro really pondered it for a bit, then he said wistfully…

“Mom.  When I grow up, I’m going to touch my wife’s boobs EVERY day.”

 

 

Watch out chesty ladies!  Here he comes!

Puberty is approaching.  And he’s a boob man.

10 Things You Can do to Help a Family Affected by Autism

LOVE #6!  Ro definitely needs that!

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/autism-in-real-life/201101/10-things-you-can-do-help-family-affected-autism

 

GOT TANTRUMS? GET GORILLA NEST!

Tantrums are one of the harder aspects to deal with when it comes to most spectrum kids.  At least in this Mama’s opinion.

You can read, research, practice, etc., etc., but when a big one really hits (literally – hee hee), it can be very hard to access all of what you’ve learned – much like the processing of our kiddos!

After a particularly rough tantrum recently, Mama had tried all of the usuals, and they weren’t working.  I had an idea!  I love when that happens!  When you are just at the end of your rope with nowhere to go – poof, out of sky this remarkable idea falls.  This makes Mami very happy.

Anyway, have you ever seen a gorilla nest?  I know more about them than I need to, thanks to my little animal-loving friend    🙂

Gorillas build a nest in the trees, and then they retire to it about a 1/2 hour before the sun sets.  It looks so comforting, relaxing and enveloping – ooh, very beneficial for someone who is spiraling out of control!  lol

I stopped in the middle of my “breathe” “drink water” “sit with me and calm down” routine, and I just DUMPED a butt load of beanie babies onto my thrashing boy!

He stopped and looked at me curiously, like “what the hell is this lunatic doing to me?”  Then…he smiled.

I got the big quilt.  I threw that on top of him, and then I dumped another bucket of the beanies.  Next, I surrounded him with about 20 pillows, and then I packed on more weight with another bucket of the babies.

“I’m making you a gorilla nest,”  I declared.

“A calm down nest,”  he said, finally relaxed and satisfied.

He climbed out to give me a kiss, and then he buried himself back in.  He poked his head out and stared at me in relief for a minute.

I got it, and he was so grateful.

Nothing else in life compares to that feeling.

SHIT, BITCH, DIE. THERE, I SAID IT!

Welcome to the new “testing of limits” that we have been experiencing lately! 🙂

Ro has an uncanny knack of figuring out what really gets to someone, and then he unleashes it on them – sometimes, just to get a reaction for his own amusement, other times it’s to test limits, and then sometimes it’s just to punish your ass when you wrong him! lol

This particular limit-testing (or self-amusement) has been tailored just for Mama’s benefit!

Hmm, you don’t want me to say BITCH?  Ha ha!  Bitch it is!  Shit?  Oh, now I will throw a thousand and one SHITS at you!

Die?  You don’t want me to talk about dying?  I will now shout DIE, DYING and DEATH over and over again (especially at playgrounds where little kids will whip their heads around in reaction, and their parents will give me and my Mama the side-eyed “what you talking about Willis” stare).

I will not even type the new offensive word that he discovered for my shock benefit.  He only said it once, and then I cried, so he really got that saying this one was off the table, thankfully.

What has been working (somewhat) for us is having him go into his room whenever he feels the need to repeat said offending words.  He doesn’t enjoy being limited in his environment, so a timeout in his room will usually curtail the shits and bitches, but oy, it’s a trying time when we have to leave the grocery store (after 20 bitches, shits and dies) before Mama gets the tasty food on her list!  Like Joey…Mama doesn’t share food!!!!  So, this is not a particularly good experience!

Hopefully, you will laugh at my sharing of this someday, Ro, because it is quite funny (but not when I have to leave my Fage in the cart because a Nana in Market Basket is about to flap back onto the linoleum after hearing you yell BITCH at the top of your lungs!).

XOXOXO

WHAT DO YOU LIKE?

Ro loves this game, and I love playing it with him!  SO amazing to hear what is flying around in that fantastic brain!

Ro:  Mom, what do you like best about yourself?

Mama:  Do you mean how I look or how I am?

Ro:  How you are.

Mama:  I like that I can love a lot.  What do you like best about yourself Ro?

Ro:  I like that I’m nice…and I like my hair.

LOL!!! I’m so in love with him.

I never imagined that we would see the day when Ro was asking and answering such abstract questions.  It’s enough to make a Mama cry like a whiny Caillou!!!

LOVE this Short Docu on ASD and Education!!!

Three boys with various forms of ASD are profiled in the short docu below.  My fave is Joe, the middle son:  “I’m like a cat.  I never stop moving!”  These kids are amazing, and their Mom is fabulous!

It just goes to show how individual each child’s needs are in a classroom – also, how difficult of a job it is to teach each child appropriately.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to have the right support in the classroom, and sadly, most times teachers don’t have what they need 😦

MEN AND THEIR (DOUBLE) EASY CHAIRS.

VERY.  CUTE.

Ro and Lowie at Jordan’s Furniture – one of their favorite places ever!  I wish it wasn’t so blurry, but still too cute.