My Promise Today

Today I promise my children that I will be patient and not snap at them NO MATTER what type of messes occur or what type of catastrophes we have.

Yesterday.....what a day in our household. Somehow I got behind on the house work....a few months ago....hmmm.....maybe a few years ago. And I still haven't caught up yet.

With four children if you get behind on laundry in our home for just one day then you might as well expect to play "catch up" on a laundry game that seemingly never ends.

As much as we have managed to keep Patrick's autism at a fairly good level with bio-medical treatments and diet I can honestly say that Saturday was quite a flare up. Maybe I just make the topic of this post about the importance of following the GF/CF diet. We have flip-flopped around on and off this diet for years; there have been times with four children that I have wanted to believe the diet didn't really make a difference. Well, trust me, it does.

We are back on the diet, fairly stringently. We can tell it is working because our son seeks out play doh, toothpaste, and even certain papers that contain gluten. Friday was a busy...crazy busy...day in our household. We inadvertently let him eat some chicken nuggets that had gluten.

I have paid for it today. I have taken away all kid movies from him to stop with the movie talk (more about that later) but today he found some Leave it To Beaver re-runs. He decided to start repeating "Beaver, Are you Sore?" and "Beaver don't be sore." Over and Over.

Also, gluten will effect him to where he will sometimes growl at me if he does not like something. Different concentrations seem to effect this more....thin crust Domino's pizza can cause a three day growling regression. Today it was just small growling in reaction to my constant punishment for the messes he was making in the kitchen. He wanted to take cups and pour water everywhere then emulate "cleaning day" from Pippi Longstocking. If you remember, there aren't any adults that live with Pippi, and obviously for a good reason. "Cleaning Day" isn't very amusing from an adult perspective. Especially when it involves swishing water around with sock feet on the kitchen floor.

While this is occurring, the other three kids are all vying for attention: a four year old (who acts like he is still in the terrible two's) is saying "hold me, hold me"; my seven year old is saying "You never play games with me" (don't those six or seven daily games of Uno count) and actually I wasn't quite sure what the five year old was doing at this time.

So, today, as I sit here typing at 5 AM, thinking about getting the kids church clothes laid out, realizing that because of the Bible School program this morning that the kids wont have children's church (that means my son with autism will be in the sanctuary all during the church), thinking about getting myself ready, realizing the dog needs water, checking on her seven newborn puppies, I realized that I needed to try hard to be extra especially nice today. I love my children and I don't want all their memories of me to be one of my acting frustrated on the longer days. So I wrote myself a post it "B Nice." Let's hope.