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!

Monday, March 11, 2013

What is My Responsibility? What is hers

I have a feeling I need to stop hovering.  I am hovering over Caroline constantly: "Have you done this, have you done that, when is this due, don't forget to include this in your paper..." etc, ad nauseum.  I am so stressed out over whether or not she will be able to keep her grades up enough to play lacrosse that my stomach hurts.  I just don't want to deal with the fall out if she ends up sitting on the bench for the season.  The end of the quarter is officially the 15th.  I think we will have some wiggle room next week as far as turning stuff in.  But I can't even breathe today.  Having a hard time letting go of her, of my desire to make sure everything is done, done correctly, turned in within a reasonable amount of time.  This is exhausting.  Makes you just want to crawl in bed and pull the covers up over your head until school gets out for the summer.  I can't believe we have two more years of this.  I would love to think she won't need us to hover over her after the end of this semester, but I can't imagine her doing this on her own.   She misses the fine details of big assignments.  I don't know how she is going to handle college at this point.

And as we are looking to buy a house this summer, we are realizing we have to deeply lower our expectations of what we can afford now that he is in full time ministry.  I am having a hard time with this because I certainly don't want another fixer-upper.  We have had enough of that .  Raising Caroline is stressful enough.  We don't have the energy to deal with an old house that needs a lot of remodeling and repairs. Ugh!  You would hope that something in our lives would be easy!

Went to the gym to try to de-stress and it didn't help.  Drove around looking at houses and that really didn't help as everything I liked was way out of our price range.  Came home to my messy house and that didn't help.  I need Jesus today.



2 comments:

Katie said...

We've done 3 massive fixers - oh I don't want to tackle that again, financially or emotionally. I really feel your frustration with that. If we lived near each other I would totally help paint and do stuff like that! :) praying for peace for your soul. God already has a place just right for you!

Megan said...

Yes, no big fixer uppers for us! Too much time and money!!