The Parenting Conundrum.

To medicate, or not to medicate: that is the question many parents of children with issues that present as ADHD face. You have society screaming at you that ADHD is overdiagnosed, and you'll medicate your child into zombie-hood. Your support systems are leery at best, as they primarily hear the same things society is screaming. You and your spouse are wound tighter than clock springs waiting for the time your child either realizes they are seen as "lesser" or "undesirable" by other children, or the time they dash off into the street after a ball and never come home again. Your child... Sometimes you know what they think, sometimes you don't. In rare moments of lucidity, Mad Natter would say "I like being sick, mama..." while he was fevered and lethargic, continuing on to say, "my brain slows down so I can think..."

Finding our Joy

A quick bit of history for those not in the know: Mad Natter started preschool at 3. It was about three weeks in (at two days per week) that we started hearing rumblings about perhaps ADHD. Skeeve and I knew there was something amiss, but we didn't know precisely what. All we knew was that our child, from the age of 2.5, no longer seemed to meet a certain subset of developmental milestones - anything doing with delayed gratification, impulse control of any kind. Once he got into preschool, and things needed to be done on a schedule that wasn't 100% his own making, we learned that he had a distinct inability to follow directions on top of the impulse control.