A Long Time

It has been a long time since I have updated this blog.  Life kind of got in the way.  With 4 kids, it is expected to get busy, but with our 4 kids... Well life is nothing if not interesting.  I am going to give a brief rundown of what we are working with right now, then I will come back and give each child a bit of special time to go more into detail on what challenges they are facing and how we are working with them.

Remember, you are Unique.... Just like everyone else!

Frog:  Frog has had a very prominent position in this blog.  He has Autism, ADHD, PICA and Anxiety/Depression.  We are working hard to find an even balance between a healthy home life, school life, and friends.  This is not easily come by and we are not there yet, but there is hope for the future.

Monkey:  Over the past year and a half, Monkey has faced some major medical issues.  We had some surprises and came out with some new diagnosis's.  Monkey has Asthma (which we suspected) and Crohns Disease (which we had never even heard of before last September).  This has been quite a long haul and I will do a weekly post on what Crohn's disease it and how it effects a 12 yr olds life.

Ladybug: So you have to have humor to face the world and sometimes it comes out in a dark way.  J and my running joke was Ladybug was our test subject.  She has always been "neurotypical" and hasn't had any major medical issues (beyond breaking random bones :P).  Well last week we had Ladybug evaluated for speech since it can be very hard to understand her and it has been determined that she has a speech impediment and needs speech therapy twice a week.  Thankfully it is an issue that will be easily resolved with therapy.

Butterfly:  Ah the youngest and smallest.  For those that say the baby is the easy one... Eat Dirt!  Butterfly had a very rough first year and we could not discover why.  Well in March, with some help from her doctors we discovered she had a dairy allergy.  Never having had to deal with food allergies before, this was a new one for me.  Eliminating dairy helped a bit, but not 100% so back for more testing.  In August, when Butterfly was 14 months old, we discovered she is not only allergic to Dairy, but also Wheat, Potato, Oat, and Nickle.  Goodbye easy meals.  Hello having to make EVERYTHING from scratch... add the fact she is just over a year and everything on the floor ends up in her mouth, well has anyone invented a muzzle for kids yet?  jk... Kinda.

So I will attempt to do a post a week on each child and each issue as they face it.  There will be some recipes as I find great foods that Butterfly can eat, some humor (hey we all need a good laugh) and probably some griping and groaning as needed too.