For the new year, a new blog to read

I had a new visitor to my blog today. Her name is Hartley and she has her own blog, which I popped over to check out after reading the comment she left on mine. You know, as you do in such situations.

Well, as it turns out, Hartley and I have quite a bit in common, besides both having names that start with the letter H. She is an SPD Mama just like me, and she is also a parent through adoption, just like me. I just lost a major chunk of time that I had intended to use cleaning the kitchen (it turns out that the kitchen floor, which is directly attached to the most-used entrance to the house, gets ridiculously filthy what with the snow, salt, mud etc - all the stuff that used to get absorbed/hidden by the carpet in the hallway off the garage-into-house door in our old house) because I was clicking around various posts on Hartley's blog. I found myself nodding vigorously and saying "Oh YES!" and "Amen, sister!" so many times in the posts I was reading that I have decided I must share her blog with you. I mean, here is someone who knows what it's like to have to maintain utmost vigilance over seemingly innocuous things like food dyes and artificial sweeteners. Who knows how hard it is when most of the world believes there are only five senses, not seven. Who probably wouldn't bat an eye at the presence of a mini-trampoline where one normally has a coffee table in one's living room. She's living my life, albeit with two other kids (who have sensory issues of their own to boot) in the mix.

So, bloggy buddies o' mine, please meet Hartley of Hartley's Life With 3 Boys. You might want to start with her posts on You Know You Have a Kiddo With SPD When..., Parts One and Two. She also explains about those other two senses, in case you need clarification or further explanation on that topic.

Here in my own household, we're dealing with the ramifications of a holiday break with an SPD kid. Kiddo has been off her schedule (including staying up past her normal bedtime 3 nights in a row while we were visiting family for Christmas), has had things to eat that she normally doesn't ingest (hello, candy canes and Christmas cookies), has spent many hours strapped in to her booster seat in the car (oh, the horror of forced inactivity) and has had a lot more "screen time" than she ever gets in her daily life. Add to that the less-than-spectacular weather and the fact that we were without her snow boots for a few days after leaving them behind at my folks' house in NJ (Dad shipped them up to us and they arrived, thankfully, yesterday afternoon) and we have a kid who is quite a bit out of sync. Ways that one can spot this include her elevated moodiness (she had a major meltdown over dinner the other night even though it was one of her favorite menus ever), a lot more bumping into things/falling and crashing into things and people, and the increased clinginess especially in the "I need a great, big, giant, squeezy hug" vein. Which isn't such a bad thing in and of itself, except when you are trying to do something that doesn't lend itself to a great, big, giant, squeezy hug at the same time, like, say, going to the bathroom or taking a shower or cleaning the aforementioned kitchen floor. (Going to have to get some sort of mat or rug to put down there, because the plastic boot tray ain't doing the trick.) If it stays nice enough outside - that being an entirely relative term, of course, as presently what I'm considering nice amounts to only moderate snow and a temperature of 29 - I may bundle us up and head over to the park to do some sledding. I'd take her to one of the bouncy places or the Y but I've heard of several virulently nasty bugs going around, and I don't really want to throw Kiddo into that kind of a mix. She has a birthday party to attend on Saturday and that will be enough wrassling around with other germmongers kids. I mean, Kiddo's sporting some pretty good snot herself, especially in her left nostril - there have been more "bats in the cave" than I'd care to count, or even see, in the past few days. So any activity we get into Kiddo, I'd like to be of the non-germ-mingling sort. We've been doing yoga (and boy, I don't know which of us misses her most fantabulous school aide more, because her aide is a total yoga genius, as well as being an all-around amazingly wonderful person) and heavy work and I'm trying to get Kiddo back into sync, something hopefully that will be achieved by Monday when the school bus rolls up to collect Kiddo once again.

So, anyhow, here's to all the other SPD parents out there, with a special "Cheers!" to Hartley. Please do drop by her blog and check her out if you have a few minutes (or are as capable of ignoring the mess in your kitchen as I've been today)!