meeting of the minds

So tomorrow is the meeting of the minds. In other words, the meeting between parents, teachers, student, principal and apparently special education teacher. Should be awesome. Unfortunately, nothing ever seems to get accomplished at these 7:20 am meetings, since the teachers need to leave at 7:45 to go to their class. What we basically get accomplished is, the teachers tell us all the things T3 is doing wrong and then they leave us to figure things out with the counselor. As you can imagine that works out just wonderfully. Quite obvious by the fact that this will be our 4th or so meeting in the past 4-5 months. I'm getting the impression that the counselor doesn't do a very good job of passing the information on to the teachers once the meeting is over. The idea of "let's try this ..." would likely be most useful to the people who actually deal with the child on a daily basis, not the guy who deals with the child when the teachers get fed up with him and send him to the office. Oh it shall be a lovely start to the day tomorrow. Especially when T1 goes off on everyone and tells them to stop the b.s. of suspending T3 for stupid little crap. Seriously, I was on their side at the beginning, but they are becoming ridiculous. I mean, really?!? You are going to suspend a child for not turning back around in his chair. Am I missing part of the story? I better be, or I will lose my mind with them tomorrow.

But, my real question is, where on earth do I find information about helping an ADHD child, when both dad and step-mom are also ADHD? How can we help a child do the things that we cannot do ourselves? I can't organize myself so how do I help him? I can't stay on track or stay focused, so how do I help him? I can't establish my own routine so how do I help him? I can't even get to work or anywhere else on time, so how do I teach him the importance of being on time? This is an ongoing struggle which I wish someone could help me understand how to deal with. I read lots of things to try and help myself as an ADHD adult as well. It's just so overwhelming, I'm not sure where to start and how to keep up.

Well an early morning is approaching quickly ...

manic mode

Second straight day of manic mode after work. When I'm at work I'm completely unfocused, tired, or just want to do nothing. By the time I get home, I'm exhausted and starving. Then I eat and suddenly I'm non-stop organizing. Yesterday it was the coupon binder (I finally got caught up!!). Today it's T3's school papers, vet reminders/receipts, and those annoying instruction manuals for everything we own. I guess I started with these things because either there are lots of them or they are important to keep organized, or mostly because they were the main things in the first pile of papers I decided to weed through. I actually feel like I accomplished something for once!! But it makes me want to keep going, even though I'm so tired I should be asleep already. Tomorrow I will pay for it again when I'm at work, unable to focus. But I'm sure tomorrow night I will be at it again, unless I either get sick, get a migraine, or just plain crash.

We had a fairly good night with T3, minus a few talk-back moments. We are, however, at a point of severe frustration with his teacher and his school. They've absolutely got a target on him now and are watching every little move he makes to "prove" to us what a bad kid he is. Today the most problematic teacher sent another email about what he did wrong. It was so miniscule I had to wonder if it was even worth making a big deal out of it. I mean really, the kid has ADHD and behavior issues, and you want to get upset with him because he is working on Social Studies in your Language Arts class? Could you possibly pick your battles and focus on the bigger issues? How is that you expect him to change everything all at once? The woman drives me insane!! I used to be on her side, but at this point she is out of control. I'm sure she's not happy about our asking her to modify her approach to avoid some unnecessary issues. Understood, but that isn't reason to nit-pick just to show everyone that you are right and our approach doesn't work. I'm not buying it because to me it just shows that her approach doesn't work. Maybe now I'm just on the defensive but I'm tired of T3 getting in trouble for every little stupid thing. We've got a meeting set up this Friday a.m. with all of his teachers, the counselor and the dean/principal. Can't wait for the 20 minutes to be spent listening to the teachers tell us everything that we need to fix, before they go off to class. There is no time for discussion when all of the teachers are there. It's a ridiculous way to do things but what can I say? This would be meeting number 4 like this so far since apparently the first three were so successful (really?!?). Venting the frustration does make me feel better though. A little ...