Boy, he sure is......active

We used to joke that Sam went from crawling to running. Honestly, I can't remember when he started walking because I don't ever remember him NOT walking. Once he figured out how to be mobile, he never stopped. Same thing with verbalization - once he learned to talk, he was never quiet. We assumed that because he had an older brother that he idolized, he progressed faster to keep up with him. It was cute. Sam was precocious, coordinated, intelligent - how could that be a bad thing?

I remember so clearly that day when he was two years old, though, when Sam was trying to sit on the couch with his brother to watch television. He fidgeted for a long time, then got up, stood in front of the TV, and just bounced. His two little feet were planted firmly on the ground, but he bounced up and down like a little spring. Wow, I thought. He really CAN'T stay still, can he? I remember laughing it off when I brought it up to Matt, but my gut was screaming something at me. To this day, I don't know exactly what I was really feeling in that moment, but it was the moment I KNEW my baby boy had ADHD.

Saying that now is like saying the sky is blue, grass is green, and wine is good. It just IS. But back then, admitting to myself that my son had ADHD was like admitting that I sold crack to baby seals. It meant I was a terrible human being who had done something wrong to break my child. So I buried it for about a year, and bought into all those hurtful fallacies about ADHD: he's just being a boy; all kids are hyperactive; he'll outgrow this behavior.

But he wasn't outgrowing it, and it was beginning to affect him negatively in social situations. In his preschool, he was always getting into trouble because he was so impulsive and talkative. He started to see himself as a "bad kid", and nothing will break your heart faster than your 3-year old son telling you he doesn't have any friends because he's a bad kid. One day, Sammy told me through tears, "Mommy, I try SO hard to be good. My brain tells my body to be good, but my body just won't listen!!" I knew it didn't matter if I broke him or not. I needed to fix him. I took him into his 4-year well check and told his pediatrician that I thought there was a high likelihood that Sammy had ADHD. He asked us some questions, gave us some checklists to fill out and to have his preschool teachers fill out.

About that same time, there were some other issues with his preschool that we were unhappy about, so we moved him to a preschool that had a heavy arts-based curriculum (aren't all preschools arts-based?) that catered to his creative side. He began to flourish in his new setting and was rarely in trouble. Matt and I breathed a sigh of relief. So he DID just need new surroundings! We tossed the checklists and questionnaires - we didn't need them after all. Our little boy was just fine and we could lose the devil's horns we had forced ourselves to wear.

Slowly, though, we started getting the updates - Sam wasn't listening today, Sam couldn't keep his hands to himself, Sam shouts out the answers without raising his hand - that let us know the problem hadn't left, it just changed zip codes. And Matt and I were back to facing the reality that our little boy's body still didn't know how to listen to his brain.