About our Daughter

I am mother to four wonderful daughters, ages 17, 19, 21, and 23, and wife to the greatest husband on earth. God has given us a special child to raise one who was diagnosed with early-onset bipolar disorder at the age of seven, though she showed signs of it from the age of fifteen months. She also has ADHD, Sensory Integration Disorder (sensory seeking), Dyslexia, and Non-Verbal Learning Disorder-NOS, all typical comorbidities for a bipolar child. In spite of the trials, she enjoys lacrosse, running (finished her first marathon in October of 2014!), and reading and writing her own books. I will share with you the many joys and sorrows we have faced and will face in the future with the hope that you may find better understanding about this mental illness caused by both chemical and structural abnormalities in the brain. I desire that you will be encouraged by this blog if you are also dealing with a bipolar child. Thank you for reading and sharing in our journey.

How Did You Know She Was Bipolar So Young?

I wrote a long explanation of how we came to this bipolar diagnosis in a child so young under my post of March 19th of 2009. If your child or a child you know bears similarities, please seek out a good psychiatrist and don't wait for "things to get better." Often they will simply get worse, and the longer a child is unmedicated, the more damage their brain can accrue. Early diagnoses and treatment are key to providing these children with a chance at a successful life later as a teen and an adult.
Never change, start or stop a medication without the approval of your child's physician!

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Good Day

Yes, at this point I am celebrating one good day at a time.  Yesterday was a great day actually, because I finally have A CLEAN HOUSE!!! Well, at least the downstairs is clean.   The maid service had budgeted two hours to clean the downstairs, and then would come back next week to do the upstairs.  I requested this split up because having not had a deep cleaning in six months, my house was really dirty.  When you have four kids, two dogs, and add to that the fact that three of my kids are mostly home during the day, you get a dirty house really fast.  Anyway, it took them 3 and 1/2 hours just to clean the downstairs!  And they were working hard too.  But to have a picked-up downstairs, sparkling floors, dust-free blinds, and an orderly kitchen comes pretty close to heaven for me.  I feel sooooo much better.  I am thankful for this early Christmas gift from Bill's dad.  The whole world looks brighter today, and I feel like I can handle life with a spring in my step.

On top of this special treat, we had another surprise.  Yesterday we found out that it was going to cost $400 to fix our heating system for the winter.  We could pay the bill but I had forgotten all about the grocery budget when I was doing the Quicken thing yesterday.  So we had enough money to pay the bills but not eat.  Hmmm, not good.  Well, after the heating and air guys left, I got a phone call from one of the deacons at church.  The deacons wanted to do something for us and they were giving us a $400 gift card to a local grocery store!  Isn't that impeccable timing?  Wow.  Thanks, God.  No, not abandoned at all.  2 Corinthians 4:7-10.

6 comments:

SarahinSC said...

Wow! God sure works in neat ways! Glad for a good day for you!

Anonymous said...

Awesome! I love how God works like that!!!!

I feel your pain on the heater repairs, we just spend $340 on our heater to fix it, and today, it's still not working. I guess we haven't spent enough money yet.

marythemom said...

Amazing! God is so good.

Mary in TX

ann said...

God is so Awesome!

Linea said...

So glad that you received such wonderful gifts! You deserve them. And sometimes, for me at least, having a clean sparkling house makes things seem less chaotic, even if they are. Enjoy!

Megan said...

Hi Linea! I agree about the clean house=less chaotic. I need less chaos and more order in my life!