And Cue the Bad Teeth Dreams

I have nightmares, on a pretty regular basis. I will confess now that it is waaaay past my bedtime, and I can't sleep because of these horrific nightmares. About my teeth. I have dreams that my teeth fall out, get chipped, cracked, need braces, and last night, my tooth just fell out in two pieces and left an exposed nerve. I don't know WHY I have weird teeth dreams and I really wish Dr. Freud could tell me. I don't even have bad teeth. I had braces, and get them cleaned every six months, without fillings (except when I was pregnant and that does not count). I really want the teeth nightmares to go away.

Add to this the stress that as if cooking for my family isn't hard enough, John had his yearly physical today (and only because he gets money for it from his company because he won't go to the doctor ever unless I pitch a fit) and because he's been having these GERD type issues needs to have some testing done and is on a restricted diet for EIGHT WEEKS. No coffee, no chocolate, no spicy (not a problem here, really), no tomatoes, or other acidic foods, no chocolate. Basically he can eat meat, and probably milky, creamy, cheesy dishes that I can't make anyway for a family meal because Jack can't eat it. So now what? Cheerios and Wheaties every day and night? He also needs to cut his sugar intake because his blood glucose levels are borderline prediabetic, which makes no sense to me because he is in great shape, works out all the time, and is no where near the obese/risk group category. Add to the fact that his diet is ridiculously healthy and for the most part CLEAN and organic and really I'm not sure what else I can do.

On an unrelated yet equally interesting in the "My Life is Fascinating" category (tongue in cheek people!) I got some interesting info from Nate's OT last week. A couple of Fridays ago I popped my head in his classroom while I was Mommy Helper and noticed he had trouble looking to the left and copying words down in his journal, so his teacher moved him right in front of the board while the other kids played and he was fine.

I should mention here that a few days after this, on Monday, we had an evening music program put together by the high school kids. Think big crowd, lots of instruments (VERY well run and organized, by the way) and a lot of auditory and visual processing that needed to be done, and you have a Nate meltdown. Literally crumpling up on the gym floor in tears because he couldn't take it all in. Thank God my very good friend was there with her OT ambulance that doubles as a minivan to transport her kids around in, throw in some chewing gum and a round of brushing protocol, and Nate was good to go, but I was heartbroken. That crumpling was very hard to watch.

Fast forward to last Wednesday. He had his eye doctor appointment mandated by the state and has 20\20 vision. Yay. However I told his OT what happened in school, so she put him on a platform swing standing and moving side to side. She had beanbags which spelled out the letters of shapes, and while he was swinging she put the bags to his right, and had him read out the letters. He did okay. Now switch to the left side. He couldn't do it. Did not know what the letters where. This signals some sort of processing deficit on his left side, and we are not sure if this is reflective of his ATNR not diminishing enough http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATNR(EVERY BABY has an ATNR, but it diminishes at different rates), or if something else is going on. I do know that once he got he sensory system organized in OT on Wednesday, he was able to talk to his speechie about our trip to Disney. A Year and a half ago. It took that long to process it and come out in a normal 5 year old conversation. She said she knew more about our trip last week than she did 5 minutes after we got back. She made note that when he is organized enough in his body, all of the oral motor and speech issues are secondary and he is stimulable and does really well with all of his articulation issues.

Our OT also gave us more 'homework". Because Nate has been stripping when he comes home from school and physically craving the electronic downtime of Wii, she thinks he can hold it together in school just long enough, so that when he gets home, he cannot stand to have anything touching him and have to process THAT. So we are back to brushing. And we do music therapy, and our "starfish" exercise that takes him through his PNF patterns http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/PNF to get his neurons all fired up and ready for school. It all seems to be working though...at soccer on Thursday he was EN FUEGO and scored 4 goals. He had to be taken out and made "goalie" even though they don't have a goalie for 5 year olds just so that he couldn't score on the other team but would still be able to say he had game time.

I suppose all this hard work is paying off. Jack came home with LOADS of work to do because he is too distracted to do it in class and in doing it got half the math problems wrong, which Nate was more than happy to answer for him. Nate's a smart kid, and with all of the help he's getting he is able to show people now. So I guess I feel good about that.

Now I need to start focusing more on Jack I suppose and figure out why he is destroying pencils by using his scissors to mangle them into weapons during class instead of getting his work done. I'm sure he could use a little OT too. They're like modern day Annie Sullivans, I swear.

Maybe one of them could cure my teeth nightmare dilemma.