Not horribly, but depressed. The potty training thing has me very defensive and upset, mostly because my kid is having a genuinely really hard time and I hate watching it.
Also, he’s calling his Day Care lady “Mommy” just to fuck with me.
****
Dear Wallace,
I love you. You are sometimes a little turd.
Love,
MOMMY
What do your top ten movie choices say about you?
I would not fit into the book High Fidelity. I cannot make top ten lists to save my life. One moment X is my favorite, the next Y is all I’m into. What I did was try and pick 10 movies that I would always be willing to watch or that I’d watch two times in a row without being bugged.
Here is my list:
You are the Vivacious Romantic
Can anyone really understand anyone else? Vivacious Romantics are out to answer this question, armed with a powerful zest for life. They desperately desire love, but they also fear having it. These witty and charming heroes constantly ponder the mysteries of love, their minds racing with theories and contradictory notions. But whether they know it or not, they are on a mission to find…
Meh. Maybe sometimes, I guess.
How about you?
EDIT: D’oh! I forgot O Brother Where Art Thou? Although I doubt it would have changed my result.
This suddenly being able to smell things is just bizarre. It isn’t with me all the time, but will suddenly kick in and I’ll get bombarded with information. Today, walking through the pedway to get lunch I smelled: all kinds of food; one hallway smelled specifically like my fifth-grade lunchroom on Friday pizza day; one hall smelled like new paint, although it hasn’t been painted in two weeks; hairdresser smells from all directions; the smell of people; a mix of paper and metal from one hallway; just on and on.
It’s like the wattage on my nose suddenly gets jacked up.
I can’t eat the strawberries in my lunch today because they have too much flavor. Enough that one I ate made my eyes water. And I keep smelling fruit everywhere.
Again, like early pregnancy bionic nose. It’s very weird.
I would like your advice, Peeps.
Not too too long ago, we tried potty training for a weekend. The pee part went fine and dandy, but the poo part was very traumatizing for all of us. Wallace went from not wanting to poop on the potty to being terrified to poop on the potty all the way to being terrified for 24 hours to poop anywhere. That was not the goal we were aiming for, so we pretty much abandoned training.
For the past month, Wallace has continued to pee on the potty around diaper change times, in the morning and evening and before his bath. He’s been doing that reliably for about seven months, so it’s not at all traumatic. However, any attempt to poop on the potty sent him into a murderous rage for the rest of the day. The very idea of pooping on the potty seemed to offend him down to his toes. So we didn’t insist. He was ready, but disinclined to acquiescse to our request, so we stopped requesting.
Two mornings ago, when he pooped on the potty, he took himself off to do it. His dad didn’t insist or ask; nobody nudged him; he just took himself off and did it. He seemed initially thrilled by all the hoorays he received, but since that time he has been a roiling mass of misery.
Nothing is good enough, all answers are wrong. He’s hitting and kicking and sad and pouty and whiney and miserable. Nothing cheers him up for more than five minutes at a stretch and he wakes up this way. What it looks like to me, although I’m no child psychologist, is that he’s seriously uncomfortable with going on the potty and what it means. He doesn’t want to grow up.
Beyond the obvious exhaustion we’re all feeling dealing with a screaming, fitting, suddenly out-of-character hitting kid, it breaks my heart to watch him fight something so bitterly that is so inevitable. He doesn’t want to grow up, but his little body and brain aren’t with the program and they continue to mature even as he fights it.
My question to you, as professional People with Opinions, is what tack we should take as parents of a miserable potty-ready child who does not want to be a potty-ready child. Do we just hang with him during this hard time and keep going with the diapers until he settles into something more comfortable? Or, do we do a big potty-training weekend this weekend and just bite the bullet and alter reality until underpants and potties are the norm rather than the exception?
My instinct is that he needs help. His reaction to using the potty hasn’t changed in two months. He’s making physical progress, but not emotional progress, and he seems to be stuck in a rut that he can’t get out of. My instinct is to just get rid of the diapers, go for the gusto, and work through the drama until the change is accepted. I’m afraid that by letting his initial freakout to pooping stand, we’ve confirmed in his mind that it’s a big horrible thing. Maybe it’s like insisting he get back on his bike after falling off. No big deal, you just get up and ride again, Tanto.
At the same time, I’d like to give him a helpful boost to the next developmental level, not toss him over the edge of a miserable abyss against his will.
Help! What would you do?
And, if the first post is any indication, it will be highly entertaining.
You can see it by clicking here. It’s a brand new blog by a brand new blogger. Go and give her a hello if you get a chance!
KP
Some quick observations from 24 hours on the new med.
My sense of smell is back.
This is by far the weirdest thing about being on the medictaion. About six months ago I noticed that my sense of smell was seriously impaired. Yesterday, and I have to think it was the medication, my nose unexpectedly roared to life and was the recipient of tons of information. It was disconcerting and also pleasant and unpleasant. Like being bombarded in the face with pillows of various firmnesses.
Colors are richer.
Not because I’m all rosy and happy, but because colors are actually deeper. Everything I look at appears to be cut firmly and outlined clearly. Riding home on the bike yesterday was like riding through a picture book, or suddenly finding myself in the unreality of film where everything is prettier than real life. I don’t know how this makes me feel. Right now I’m just experiencing it. It feels like being able to see every individual grain of sand in an hour glass; things are exploding with detail. I have a feeling that the smells and colors of life are true, but that I’ve been walking around in a fog. Or like someone with gunky contacts who suddenly had them cleaned. Who knew green could be that GREEN?
Terrible stomach upset.
I was told to expect this as a side-effect, but we didn’t expect me to have it too strongly because I would be already transitioning from something else. Once again my body proves to be hyper-reactive to medication and I’m walking around with a medium-level nausea, unfortunately the same I experienced when I was pregnant, so it’s all familiar, but not in a happy way. Yesterday my last meal was breakfast, and I have a feeling the same will go for today. Luckily I have absolute years worth of fat stores saved up for just such an occasion; also it will wear off eventually. It makes an interesting change from all the meds I’ve been on that were appetite enhancers, though.
Mood?
Who knows? We had a rough night last night (more in next post), but I would like to point out that it would have been rough with or without meds. I was a wreck past 8pm the way I usually am, however I was unusually low on sleep. It’s a little early to know how the meds are affecting my mood, but I’m not worse than I was and panic attacks are not appearing, so that’s good.
Further bulletins as events warrent.
Last night we had Wallace’s cousin Bean over for dinner. Bean is about a year and a half old and was wiggling around in his seat. His mom was trying to get him to sit still to keep him from sliding off the chair and Wallace gave her an earful, “No, Aunt Mo! You havta leave him alone. He’s a big boy. He’s sitting in a big boy chair. You leave him alone so that he can eat.”
Mo and I exchanged glances and she laughingly made a shout-out gang sign about Wallace’s getting Bean’s back, and he looked right at her and made it back.
Only he smacked his chest twice with his palm and threw out two fingers, “TWO!”
Word.
After much drama and fear with the crying and grabbing and refusal, this morning Wallace pooped on the potty!
We will be heading out after work today to get him the basketball hoop and real! basketball! he was promised.
GO WALLACE!
I have been in that space, lately, where everything I touch falls apart. I walked past a door yesterday and it fell away from the wall. Seriously, I didn’t even touch it. I used a safety pin today after my purse’s strap fell off, and the safety pin fell apart in my hand. The seat on my bike fell down. TT got a flat tire, which I’m sure I had something to do with.
In that vein, I lost my cell phone. That means that I have lost the means I used to get in touch with many of you, Peeps. That means that don’t call me on my cell phone because I lost it. Also, don’t let me near anything you really care about.
*BLAM!*
Mama just has The Depression.
I’m not normally the shy, retiring type (I know!), but this whole switch from my tried-and-true brain med to the new one has me pretty down. Not just because I’m terrified that my original 12-years-gone brain weirdness will reappear, but because I had always hoped that I’d someday make the transition from my current med to no meds, rather than current med to a different med.
I’m also nervous, because sometimes if you leave your normal medication your brain hijacks itself and you can’t go back. To switch meds is often to embark upon the point of no return.
I would violently scoff at anyone who was depressed about taking antidepressents (not just because that’s so utterly amusing but) because they are so incredibly helpful when you really need them, and yet I cannot give myself the same leeway I would so easily grant someone else.
If you doubt whether I really need them I advise you to go back in this blog and read how many times I was angsting myself to death over less than nothing, the amount of times I crippled myself with guilt for no reason, and/or how many times The Crazy just comes seeping over the edges of your computer screen like a blob-blog thing. That, or you can come over to my house after 8:00pm which is apparently the hour at which my brain checks out for the day and leaves me a sodden, weeping mess. Boy, those nights at home are fun! Yatzee anyone?
I’d love to be someone for whom antidepressents are a toe-dip in a lifetime of prescription drug use, but unfortunately that is not me. I’m currently in the “flying fish” of antidepression drug use, and I’ve almost tested out of my water wings.
Tomorrow morning I start my new pill-poppers (WARNING: NOT JALAPENO POPPERS) and we’ll see if within a few weeks I don’t trick my brain into actually enjoying all the blessings we actually have around us, as opposed to inventing eleventymillion reasons to be sad, sad, sad.
NO MORE NEVERENDING SAD.
Here’s hoping.
** If you’ve found this blog by googling moms and antidepressants, or anything like that, here’s proof that, amongst cool moms and bloggers, you are not alone.
Dooce takes pictures every day with a Nikon D70
I take pictures occasionally with a Sony Ericsson wireless phone.
Pic of the day
