I decided to start this blog to be an outlet for me while we go through this journey with our oldest daughter, Kalie, and to possibly give support to other parents going through similar things. Here's her story--
Kalie is an energetic, silly, talkative,athletic 6, almost 7, year old. She is in first grade. She attended one year of preschool at the age of 4 and then went into kindergarten at the age of 5. Completely normal. She did well in both and excelled. Then she entered first grade and some things started to change. She had seemed to forget all the sight words she learned and her reading seemed to have gone backwards. We had our first parent teacher conference to discuss the normal testing they do in the beginning of the year and everything else going on in the class.
Her teacher (I'll call her Ms. B) told us she was right were she should be academic wise, but she was a little talkative and tended to be a distraction to others. She was also having a hard time getting her work done because she was distracted. Not exactly what I wanted to hear, and something that I had been suspecting for 3 years came back to play in my mind.
Four months into the school year, Ms. B came rushing out to me after school telling me "Oh my word, Kalie is having a hard time keeping her hands to herself" Kalie was balling and I was fighting tears back because I could tell how upset Kalie was. Apparently, Kalie had been tickling a little girl in her class, accidently touched her butt. It was blown out of proportion by little girls grandma, taken to the principal and then Kalie had to be talked to, by the PRINCIPAL, about keeping her hands to herself. Because of this, I think Ms. B threw it out of proportion too. Kalie and I cried the whole way home. We later talked to the principal about it, and she was so nice and let us know that she knew Kalie was being innocent and silly. It was a silly thing but as a parent you never want to hear that the principal had to talk to your child.
Remember that little something that was in the back of my mind? Well, I decided we needed to talk to the pediatrician about it. That something is ADHD. Let's pause here and rewind 5 years--
When Kalie was a baby she had the normal amount of hair, not too much just normal. At about 1 I started to notice that it was thinning and would occasionally find some in her crib. I thought it was just rubbing off while she slept. She was also a finger sucker so as she got a little older I noticed she would suck her pointer finger and twirl her hair. It would knot, she would pull. By age two, we would find hair all over her bed and all over the floor around it and sometimes in her diaper. She literally looked like a cancer patient at one point. Her hair would grow back sporadically. From 2-3 she started to let up a little and it grew back, it was beautiful and had a little curl in it. I was finally able to put a bow in it, it was great!! When she was 33 months, I gave birth to her sister. Then things went downhill. She started acting out like crazy and started to go bald on one side again. I researched this and came up with trichotillomania. I also found that people that suffer from this can also have OCD issues or ADD/ADHD. As time went on, the ADHD symptoms kept popping up. I brought it up with her ped at age 3 and was told she's too young because normal 3 year old behavior (tantrums, disobedience, high energy) is similar to ADHD and its hard to tell. She told us to have her tested in first grade if it was still an issue.
Ok, now back to December of 2012. We took her to the ped and was given two surveys, one for us and one for Ms. B, to fill out. It asked a bunch of questions about her behavior and emotions. We took it back to the ped and she told us Kalie definitely has ADHD and advised us to take her to a child therapist/psychologist. We also told her we did not want to medicate Kalie and she agreed. We took the list of child therapists home and only one of them was covered by our insurance and she wasn't taking new patients. What were we going to do?
To be continued..
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