Highs and Lows - Pt 2 in Life

Without apostrophes, confirmed thanks to Lis. Make sure to go check her out if you have time and are looking for someone else to read.

I feel like I’m writing a string of consistent entries here, it’s a very foreign concept.

Unsurprisingly, there has been a lot of communication in the house these past couple of days. Lets start with 5y/o.

So lately she’s been a mess, actually just this week is started. Tuesday night she went back to her Emotional Terrorist state and started swinging and fighting everything that has anything to do with us giving her directions. We were really unsure of what went on because normally she’s an angel, other than developmental leaps. Those are always messy. But we get through them. And this week it was just like… Developmental leap from hell, which tell us that someone, somewhere is doing something wrong and she doesn’t like it or know how to express it (A common theme in our household as you’ll come to discover) So Wife and I talked about what was going on, when it started and how we were both entering blind rage states when dealing with her. Lots of yelling and snapping and one walking away so the other can take over with a full emotional battery. Lately with my daughter we’ve done… retractive? discipline, so taking away. I guess Punishment based discipline would be a better way to call it. So normally she’ll get a ‘treat’ after school like a candy or a sucker or something if she’s had a good day and if she’s had a bad day, she doesn’t get that treat. There’s obviously flaws with the program, any sort of food based reward is shakey at best but once I start mentioning the potential harm that a food based economy can do to a developing young child, my wife chimes in with the ‘they’re just big kids’ discussion and it’s like “Okay calm down, I’m not saying any one is fat, chill” but it’s also been “Okay no TV”, “Okay no book at bedtime” etc etc etc.

So we’ve shifted gears to a Sticker based economy where when she does things from as vague as “Listening” to as specific as “Getting ready for school” she gets to put a sticker on the board. So it’s more reward based. And so far it seems to be working well.

However.

That’s just what she sees.

What Wife and I have started doing is shifting our focus to recognizing her achievements. Recently 18m/o has been stealing the spotlight in that as he’s having major milestones and doing insane things like Chin-ups on the dishwasher handle (He’s 30lbs, my 5y/o is 40) The Son is “Just a Big Kid” I call him my little tank, or bowling ball, or wrecking ball, whatever is suitable for the situation. Regardless.

My daughter went from counting from 1-20 and all these cool achievements to slipping between the cracks and suddenly we accidentally stopped focusing on her scholarly achievements. So like I said (I think?) we took her out of the Little Ninja’s class because she’s got a lot of great stuff out of it, but she wants to advance quicker than that specific class is set up to do, it’s basically group play time and there’s nothing stopping the other kids from getting their ‘sticker’ at the end of the class regardless of how they acted or listened through out. That was always a thorn in my side and I think Ellie picked up a bad perspective from that.

So we took her outta that, and put her into a Music class that she does /with/ me. So she goes up and sings with the teacher and other kids then comes back to the keyboard and plays a note or two and the teachers are amazing (So far, just one class) but today Ellie and I practised at home, together, just her and me, and I think that’s really what she needs. She needs to hear “Good job Ellie!” too and with the same ex(oh god how do I spell this) Exzuuuberance… hold on, I got this… exuberance. Huh, no s. And now you know! With the same exuberance as when we see the 18m/o jump or some other feat of strength that he pulls off.

Speaking of the 18m/o, we’re signing a contract for a private daycare that should be opening in 2 weeks! And we’ll see how that goes! Right now I’m not getting too excited. I’m happy, but tempered on that topic I wanna say.

Onto me.

Jesus this is an entry and half.

Recently I stumbled upon someone talking about Alexithymia. Which, I’m going to preface this with “I don’t like to self diagnose, I just don’t like doctors more” So I do a lot of theorizing about things that are going on inside of me but I don’t run around telling people that I ‘suffer from X because Google says I have Network Connectivity Issues” I don’t judge those that do, you’re probably smarter than I am when it comes to your own body, you do you boo.

But I came across this video about Alexithymia that describes it as Emotional Blindness. Which sounds interesting but then I started to go through everything they talk about it it checks all the boxes. As I said to my wife “Y’know how sometimes when you’re looking for an answer you kinda answer questions so that you fit in that box, I don’t have to do that with this” and there’s this whole thing where they talk about it being caused by trauma and yadda yadda yadda all that sort of neurodivergency (I love that Auto correct wants to turn this into “Counterinsurgency”) stuff that happened to us in our childhood or how we were raised because men were raised to show emotions etc etc. I’m glossing heavily because I’ve only just started to look into it but it could be a game changer to get therapy under this subject. There’s a lot of personal introspection that I need to do to unlock that specific deficiency but it’s something that I feel is going to be a game changer.

Alright this train of thought is tired.