Yes, Gnat was diagnosed when he was 20 months. Wait, maybe 22 months. I don’t remember. Two weeks after I got H1N1 and while I was pregnant with TomKitten. It’s an extra layer of interesting on top of the little-kid problems. Most of the time it’s pretty okay most of the time but when he gets sick his blood sugar goes nuts and we’ve got to wake him up to test him and monitor him much more closely. it can be pretty difficult. The last couple of days have been nuts-tantruming-sick-high-blood-sugar days.
The one thing a kid can’t stand is parents looking comfortable.
My goddaughter’s a diabetic (Type I) and she and some of the other teens got drunk a while back. Standard stupid teen stuff. But what surprised me about it was her analysis: “I felt like I do when my blood sugar’s really high…it felt awful! And I just wanted to scream at someone and pick a fight.” (As a matter of fact, she did just that, but she doesn’t remember it.)
Of course, alcohol and diabetes don’t mix well, but I thought it was an interesting insight into how high blood sugar feels. Apparently, at least to some people, it makes them feel like an angry drunk. Huh. Made me a little more understanding the next time she was grouchy because her blood sugar was too high.
That totally makes sense. Gnat acts like he’s on Slab, or some other troll drug- he gets grouchy, demanding, wants to pick fights, and has no attention span. I mean, less than usual. And he’s hyper beyond words and feels sick.
It sort of bothers me when other parents whose kids aren’t diabetic nod sagely and say, “Oh, I know what high blood sugar is like. When my daughter has a whole strawberry she’s off the walls.” Grr. No, you don’t know. Your kid is self-regulating, and will never go into convulsions because someone gave him a chocolate bar.
I know it’s just me being grumpy and they’re trying to empathise.
I drank a little when I was a teen (it was legal, and I never drank anything stronger than beer, and only in the 40ºC+ summer), never got drunk, realized very early that red wine gives me headaches… and have spent almost 30 years hearing “oh but you have to drink”, “just one glass!” or “if your teen years were so much fun, imagine if you’d drunk!” (this last one is a recent addition). I will sometimes drink a little, but just a little, just to try some low-alcohol local specialty (pilsen in the Czech Republic, cider in Scotland).
My mother used to be firmly in the “just one glass!” camp, combined with the “one glass of wine is good for you, specially red wine” (see “headaches”, above), until that day when I was describing how I feel when I’m starting to have an attack of That Undefined Neurological Condition. After a while, she said “but wait, what you’re describing sounds like how I feel when I have a pleasant buzz” “well, it’s also how I feel when I’ve drunk just a little too much, but for me it’s not pleasant because it feels like the start of an attack: my hindbrain starts yelling ‘stop! lie down! you’re getting sick! you shouldn’t be vertical! don’t get in the car!’” “oh! :smack:”
It’s so nice to be able to have lunch with her without going through the whole “red wine is good for you” routine
I saw this happen once, and the Mother responded by nodding encouragingly and saying: “That’s right. Now picture that, times ten, and add the threat of coma or death. Now you’ve got what diabetes is like.”
ETC: It was “coma or death”
I was so impressed with her, she always tried to turn things into teaching moments, and I follow her example whenever I remember. . .
Oh boy, now we know what we’re looking forward to in another 6 months.
Beta-chan’s latest is to decide she doesn’t want whatever is the cause of the frustration or discipline.
We don’t have a lot of rules, but she’s not allowed to throw things off her high chair. She get removed from it, the bib comes off and she gets deposited in the living room.
Tonight, she tossed her spoon (and it was intentional, I was watching) so off she was taken.
She was told she could eat when she picked up her spoon, but no, now she didn’t want anything to do with food.
During a crying fit yesterday I asked Gnat what was wrong, and he sobbed, “We don’t have any food or clothes, and we don’t have any place to live aside from this house!” Sob, sob.
Okay. We’re considering getting him into child acting, we’ve got such a good line in melodrama happening.
Hmmmnnn. Is he internalizing the news reports? Be careful, at this age they have little to no filter between “happening to someone else” and “happening to me.”
Celtling is especially vulnerable to this, and I have to remember to turn off NPR when she’s in the car with me. . .
I feel y’all’s pain, truly, but…
This thread cracks me up! I’m an old mom of a 26 year old, with no grandkids. I can’t remember tantrums, so all these stories are very cute.
I know, I feel sorry for them, too, but I keep coming back here to read more. Especially the story about the baby that stopped in the middle of the tantrum to tell Mommy he loved her, and she thought she’d up the bread and water just a little. MrsWhatsit maybe?
“My cruel parents! They bought me a train set and we went to the park and had ice cream but it was the wrong ice cream!!!”
I’m glad everyone is enjoying this. It is really funny, just really funny a day or two later, mostly. Or sometimes years down the road. After they’ve survived childhood.
I don’t think he’s heard too much about the tsunami- we talked with Gnat a bit about it and said that people were hurt and sad because a big wave washed a city away, and could he please say a prayer for them with us? It could be that but it seems to me like an ongoing series of poor little me attempts about how the food is the wrong food, or the toys are the wrong toys.
My mother says he’s just having this amazing attack of selfishness. Dunno what is causing it.
I haven’t killed him yet today, and I didn’t yesterday during an excruciating sciatica attack. I am proud of myself.
I’m glad you’re saying this every day. Keep on doing it. It helps. Too bad your son can’t distract you from your pain - that’s the worst, being stuck at home while you’re sick. I had to take care of my son while he had a severe upper respiratory infection and I had shingles. It was a nightmare. My husband was good enough to stay home until I was no longer considered contagious and the pain was more bearable, but my eye was still swollen shut when he had to go back to work. Not only did I look like Quasimodo, I couldn’t drive us anywhere, either because I had to hold one of my eyes open so I could see (it was swollen shut since the shingles got in my eye).
Hang in there. It’ll be over…sometime.
Here’s a little story for your entertainment:
I was sitting around eating an empanada one day. It was left over from a nice restaurant my husband and I had gone to the day before. My son started screaming when he saw it. When I finally got him calmed down enough to ask what was wrong, he said, “Mommy! You’re eating gingivitis! Stop!” My mom was there, too, and had to go to the bathroom to avoid peeing in her pants because she was laughing so hard. I also had to leave the room temporarily. He was dead serious about it, too, and it killed me not to roll on the floor laughing.
J has entered a really effing annoying phase - the “but I don’t want to” phase. All of a sudden he doesn’t want to go potty (he was doing great on potty training), he doesn’t want to pick up his toys, he doesn’t want to brush his teeth, he doesn’t want to get his jammies on, he doesn’t want to sleep. Unfortunately, all of these things are pretty much necessary (we wouldn’t care if he slept in his clothes, but if he doesn’t go potty before bed and get an overnight diaper on, he’ll wake up soaked at about 3am). Taking away the toys that are not picked up doesn’t seem to have much of an effect, so far, but we’ll see if that changes as his toy selection dwindles.
I hate all these little battles; it’s so draining. Nothing seems to work, either. We haven’t gone so far as to, say, not change his clothes when his diaper overflowed because he wouldn’t go potty, mostly because I really don’t think he’d make the connection in any meaningful way. I’m also tempted to just not make dinner one night, because I don’t want to, and see how he likes that. But again, I don’t think he’d really get it.
Sometimes - frequently! - child, we have to do things we don’t really want to do. And that’s just the way it goes. It will be much more pleasant for ALL of us if you just do it! Then we can spend more time playing and less time arguing and having hissy fits. Too bad the logic chip doesn’t activate till they’re in like 1st grade.
Yeah, right now, everything’s a battle and it really is draining. Yesterday we had a minor victory- he didn’t want to come to the table for dinner. He argued, we explained about having to do things we don’t want to do, and he came! A miracle! And complained for the first five minutes that he didn’t want to be eating, but it’s still amazing, and we congratulated him for doing something he didn’t want to do.
I am also tempted to not do things because I don’t feel like it, and see how Gnat likes that. We’re working on, “I won’t play with you if you’re being mean (hits, shouts, throws things, has tantrum)” and I’m hoping the lesson sinks in sometime in the next twenty years.
You know, I thought I was pretty good about picking my battles, but I’ve found that starting from a place where I need to explicitly justify* every “No” I say to them has made life a lot better this last week or so. I realized that a lot of my controlling and just saying they had to do it my way was not actually necessary stuff, but just the way I’d planned it or thought it should be. When they get their way a lot more it makes it easier for them to comply with the non-negotiable stuff. I will even listen to their (polite) argument why my declaration should be overturned.
It’s a little scary to give them more control and stop functioning on a “I’m the parent, so I make all the rules” basis, but it also seems to actually work.
*In my head - I don’t engage in a debate with them every time I tell them to do something
I was reading parts of this thread to a friend who doesn’t have kids, and she was weeping with laughter. I think, “I want pasta!” is going to become a catch-phrase.
