Doctoring, Exercising and Charting

We had our doctor's appointment today.You know how when you have a car that is making a bad sound and take it to the mechanic and while you are there the car refuses to make the sound? Well, today Kendall slept until 7 and has been pleasant and happy all day, figures. First I just gave him the general overview and told him what we have been doing to try and improve the situation (more exercise, careful meal choices, picture schedule to give her a feeling of control over her day…). He checked her over physically and said that she is healthy but that she does have much larger then normal tonsils (which we knew) and that they could be keeping her from getting into her deep sleep pattern. We’re going to make a tape of her sleeping and take it to her ENT. Hopefully that will be enough to make a decision and we won’t have to do the sleep study. We had already decided to do this anyway but it was nice to have him confirm our thoughts. He said that our routines and changes sounded great and if it weren’t for her grouchiness he would just assume that she was waking so early just because she wasn’t tired. This was really nice to hear. When something is going wrong it's hard not to worry if your parenting may be cause.

He gave me a couple of ideas such as altering her clock to have a big picture on the seven and tell her to stay in her room quietly until the red hand is on the picture. I think that we'll try this and see how it goes.

Here is the picture schedule that I made. I took a ton of pictures (not all of them are shown) had them printed in wallet size and laminated them. I would like to have them hang on the fridge but since I laminated them the magnets won't stick to the slick surface so until I find a solution this large blue thing is filling in. It's actually really nice but takes up too much room in the kitchen. So far Kendall likes it and can interpret what each picture means. I go through and explain each of them the night before and in the morning and she can refer to it during the day to get an idea of what to expect.