To update this article: Sydney is now in sixth grade. Just recently she was called out of class and interviewed by three teachers. They asked her questions about her goals, her feelings about school, and her hopes for the future. Of course, she told them that she hopes to be a teacher one day, and also how much she values her education. She was then told that she was being interviewed for the “advanced” classes. Sydney came home from school that day and told me, “Mom, you just can’t understand after all that I have been through to even be considered for advanced classes is such an honor.” Sydney is now three inches taller than I am. I know that she will make it into the advanced the classes, but more important, I know that she will succeed in life. And that is all a mother can hope for.

I was thinking about this last night and it made me think, if parents get smart and know not to diclose unnecessary information to a new doctor, will the doctors begin to have their receptionists “screen” patients to be sure that there are no difficult to treat diseases or disorders? Is this legal? Can doctors pick and choose who they decide to see? The thought of this really scares me.

 Our original pediatrician was no help in steering us toward an ADHD diagnosis, after years of struggles.  Through talking to other mothers, I found an awesome pediatrician who was extremely knowledgeable about neurological disorders.  I called the office of this doctor to ask about switching to his practice and asked what the first step should be to obtain a diagnosis.  The receptionist gave me the name of a reputable psychologist who could do the testing.  Since my children were not sick and had already had their annual exams, I did not immediately make an appointment to visit the new pediatrician.  Instead, I made an appointment with the psychologist. 

 We obtained the ADHD diagnosis with a recommendation to medicate my daughter.   I then called the new pediatrician to make an appointment, telling them that she had just been diagnosed with ADHD.  I was told that this doctor was no longer accepting ADHD patients.  If I had made the appointment before the diagnosis, they would have taken us.  I then called five other doctors all telling them the same thing and each doctor refused to see my daughter. 

I refused to go back to our original doctor who was of absolutely no help through the more than ten years of struggles.  I called the psychologist back and explained the problem, asking him if he knew of any physicians who accept ADHD patients.  He gave me the name of several doctors who he believed would accept a new ADHD patient.  Each office again refused my daughter as a patient when they were told that she was ADHD. 

Finally, frustrated and willing to do anything to help my daughter, I waited a month and called back the original doctor who had been so highly recommended and referred us to the psychologist in the first place.  I made an appointment, never mentioning ADHD.  I played dumb when I got to the office and never mentioned ADHD until the end of the check-up when I pulled out the diagnosis from the psychologist.

At that point, he did not refuse her as a patient.  I am wondering if this is an insurance issue for the doctors or maybe a malpractice problem.  I don’t know what it is, but if you are moving and need a new doctor for an ADHD child, be sure NOT to tell them about the diagnosis until after you are in the door. 

Where are we going again? Oh yeah, does anybody know how to get there? I just hope the neighbors aren’t watching how long it takes us to pull out of the driveway.

“One more time and you’ll go to time out.” “Ok…but, Mom, can I have a cupcake?… Ooops.”

The toddler is so busy; she’s running and climbing.
Crash! I’m off and running again.
What would I do with one day to myself?
Would I pick up the toys and change the sheets on the beds?

The four-year old is singing another song she made-up;
Dancing a dance with wiggles and such.
“Mommy, please come you gotta see this!”
What would I do with one day to myself?
Would I sit and watch Oprah and eat peanut butter cups?

The five-year old is painting a picture for me.
There is paint on the floor, on the cupboards and in the sink; handprints on the walls. What would I do with one day to myself?
Would I clean up this mess and make my own craft?

The six-year old is reading and calling my name.
“Mommy, please come help me with this!”
What would I do with one day to myself?
Would I pick up a novel and read all by myself?

The seven-year old is going to sleep.
“Mommy, please rub my back and sing me to sleep.”
What would I do with one day to myself?
Would I listen to music and catch up on my shows?

What would I do? I would dream a dream of a little girl to hold, to chase, to sing with, to paint with, to read with, and to tell her sweet dreams each night. That’s what I’d do.

With my first child, I worked full-time and my daughter was in daycare. I have heard people rave that daycare is wonderful because they teach your kids potty-training. The peer pressure helps to motivate most kids. It didn’t motivate Sydney.
I tried everything. I talked to the doctor. I followed all of her suggestions. Nothing worked. Finally, the week after my daughter’s third birthday, I sat her down on the couch. I looked her in the eyes and I said, “All of your friends use the potty, Mommy and Daddy use the potty. Everyone I know uses the potty. You are three years old. You are a big girl and you need to use the potty. All the time, not just once in a while. “ She thought about it for a moment. I let her leave the couch to play, visions of a kindergartner in diapers swirling in my head. To my surprise, within five minutes, she was flying around the corner in the kitchen, determined to make it to the bathroom on time. And that was it. She was potty trained. No stickers, no bribes, no threats, just a simple heart-to-heart chat. We were done. After two years of frustration, arguments, stress, feeling like a failure, and wondering which one of us was the slow learner. Two years of discussions with every mother I knew who had any opinion on the subject. And then that was it. She was potty trained… well… at least until her sister came along 8 months later and she completely regressed, but that’s another story.
My second daughter came along and this time I was a stay-at-home mother. I was determined to get this child trained before two. I could do it. I was intelligent, educated, well read on parenting issues; it would be a piece of cake. I had trained two puppies to sit, lie, shake and rollover. Surely I could teach my own human child to use a potty. Again, I tried everything.

Madison simply had no interest in going to the potty. She didn’t care about stickers; she didn’t care what anyone thought about her diapers. As a matter of fact, she really liked her diapers. She was very annoyed with the whole potty thing and would throw a fit at the mere thought of it.
Fast forward, through two more years of pleading, bribing, attempting to shame her into caring. I try the heart-to-heart chat approach, but it gets me nowhere. I am desperate. I will try anything. Then it hits me- Madison loves chocolate. I stop at the store and buy a package of tiny Hershey candy bars and put them on the back of the toilet. It’s days after her third birthday. I tell her that if she’ll use the potty, she can have a miniature Hershey bar. She uses the potty three times in the next hour. I had to break the candy into smaller pieces, but by the end of the day she is completely potty trained. She even refuses to wear a diaper at night and she NEVER has an accident.
I had bribed my child, but worse, I had given her large quantities of chocolate. And so I ask… In potty training, do the ends justify the means? Does putting an end to diaper rash justify the use of chocolate on a small child? I don’t think Dr. Brazelton would ever publish the Hershey Bar technique in his parenting manuals. But it worked a miracle and sometimes lately I have found, that is all that matters. It doesn’t matter how you get there, it just matters that you do get there… eventually.
It has been several years since those potty training days and neither of my girls seem emotionally scarred by the whole experience. I, on the other hand, will never be the same. Don’t get me wrong, I love every moment of being a mother, with the exception of cleaning up barf at 2am, the trip to the emergency room when my little angel shoved corn up her nose so far that it stuck, and potty-training. I have promised myself that I won’t tell my girls that potty training was a piece of cake when they have kids of their own.
If I had the chance to do it all over again, what would I do? I would do it exactly the same way, when they turn three, and not a moment before. I wouldn’t listen to the people who say, “Look at that child, still in diapers at three.” And I wouldn’t spend two years stressing about it. But that’s just me.

Our trees have not been the most beautiful or perfectly shaped but they were picked out by the kids and I remember each one: the pregnant tree, the tree with the hole in the middle, the tree that had poison ivy growing up the trunk, the tree with the birds nest, the tree that was wider than it was tall, the 20-foot tree that we cut down because my 4 year-old thought the top 6 feet of it would make the most perfect tree that she had ever seen.

I’ll admit that there were times when I would shake my head when the kids picked out their “perfect” tree, and grin at my husband when they weren’t looking. But I haven’t forgotten a single tree (especially the one covered in poison ivy) and that’s the point. We did this as a family, and we made memories together. I have loved each one of our misshapen, deformed, crazy trees. I take great pride in the fact that when neighbors stop by our house at Christmastime, they stop to look at our tree and are silent for a moment before saying, “What’s wrong with that thing?”, or “I’ve never seen anything like that before.” I’d rather not be normal, everyone else has that one.

For many years, my husband worked on Friday nights. This was our special “girls night”. My two daughters and I would snuggle together in my large King bed and stay up late to watch “What Not to Wear”. If you haven’t seen the show, the basic premise is that two fashion consultants take a person who dresses like a troll, and teach the poor soul how to dress properly. The girls and I would make a big bowl of popcorn and eat it in bed, all snuggled together under the covers. It was fun, we would laugh at the funny outfits and talk about which outfits we like. It never occurred to me that this seemingly harmless show could cause nightmares and panic in my seven year-old.

I noticed for several weeks one January that my youngest daughter had begun to get dressed under the covers of her bed. Although I thought this was a little strange, it didn’t hurt her and I thought she was attempting to keep herself warm while she got dressed. Truthfully, I was just happy that she was dressing herself.

After a few weeks of this strange behavior, the questions began. “Mom, where are the cameras in our house?” “What? We don’t have cameras in our house.” Then later, “Mom, what would you do if someone showed you getting dressed on tv?”

It finally occurred to me that something was going on in that seven year-old brain. I sat her down and I asked, “Madison, what is this obsession with cameras in your closet?” She explained that she was terrified of the “What Not to Wear” cameras being in our house. She was absolutely anxiety-ridden over the thought that she could be video-taped while dressing and it would be broadcast on tv.

It made me think, what was causing this all-consuming fear? So this time, I began asking the questions, “Madison, do you think that you dress so badly that you’ll be put on the show?” Madison slowly and purposefully answered, “No, mom, you do!”

Of course, if we had been discussing the merits of green vegetables in your diet, our conversation would have been completely unheeded by the girls in the backseat. How is it that kids always know when you are saying something that is not meant for their ears?

Anyway, my 11 year-old started it, “Hey, Mom, I know a girl at school who’s a real jackaaaa!” Snickering, she said, “What’s a jackaaaa anyway?”

My precocious eight year-old piped up, “You sound like a real jackaaaa when you say jackaaaaa!” We all burst out laughing, and then I reminded them that “jackaaa” was a word that should never be repeated again, with or without the “s”.

Sparkles and Bows grew… and they grew…and they grew. They grew until they couldn’t turn around in their little 3-gallon tank anymore. They grew so fast that they had bare spots on their bodies where the scales hadn’t had a chance to fill in yet.
Occasionally we’d feel sorry for them and we’d fill up our bathtub and put them in it to swim. We had to make sure the bathroom door was tightly closed so that our kitty couldn’t get in and make a snack out of them. The kids thought it was neat to watch Sparkles and Bows swim in the tub. My husband thought I was crazy.

When Sparkles and Bows were two, Santa brought them a new 10-gallon home. They loved their new home and they happily swam under little bridges and over plants. Sparkles and Bows continued to grow and grow. Whenever someone came to our house for the first time, they would notice the fish immediately and always comment that they were the biggest goldfish they had ever seen.
The fish always seemed to grow much faster when we would go away on vacation and have the neighbors feed them. One day after just such a vacation, I called the pet store in a panic…just how big do goldfish get? I didn’t like the answer. I was scared to death that I would need to fork out the cash for a 20-gallon tank for my two 12-cent goldfish.

My husband wanted to get a salt-water tank. He threatened to flush the goldfish many times so that we could get more interesting fish. Each time he threatened, he was met with anguished cries from the kids, “NO, DADDY, NO!!! YOU CAN’T KILL SPARKLES AND BOWS!!!” How long do goldfish live anyway? We thought, they should die soon, shouldn’t they?

When Sparkles and Bows were about three, they developed some type of tail rot overnight. Their fins were raggedy and sad looking; we didn’t think they’d make it through the day. My husband said, “Let’s flush them tonight!” The kids said, “Mommy, pleeeeease, save our fish!” The kids won, we gave Sparkles and Bows antibiotics and they regained their health, their fins repaired.

They were too big for normal goldfish food anymore; we had to feed them larger pellets. We experimented with them, feeding them lemons, peas, corn and squash. They ate everything except broccoli. My seven-year-old said, “Mom, you’re the only one who likes broccoli. See? I told you so.”

When Sparkles and Bows were four, they were too big to swim under their bridge anymore. They ate all of the plants we put in the tank. They could jump out of their water. I was afraid that one day they would learn how to push the lid off of the tank and we’d return home to a gruesome sight on the living room floor.

Sparkles and Bows each grew to be 8 inches long. They were mammoth for gold fish; they looked big enough to cook for dinner. Then, after six long years, one morning as I was arriving at work, the phone rang. It was my husband with the news that Sparkles had died in his sleep. Our beloved gargantuan goldfish was gone. But that was not all… when you have a goldfish that big, you cannot just flush it down the toilet, as we have now learned. The toilet didn’t just clog, it began to spray water out of the back until we had a flood in the bathroom. It took my husband two days of trying to snake the toilet to get it to flush.

Bows lived just one more week after Sparkles, just long enough to meet the two new goldfish my younger daughter won at the fair on Friday. My husband sighs thinking about the salt-water tank that he will never have. Oh yes, and Bows is buried in the vegetable garden, not in the toilet.