He'll stop a blog faster than a speeding bullet

So it's been exactly one month since my last post. :(

I knew there would be times when I wouldn't be consistent and this is my first try at a blog but I had no idea this kind of thing would happen. The day after my last post I was all set to post the second half of the Brave birthday party when a whole lot of things got put on hold, including this blog, all due to one thing...

My little super hero guy Eli. 

Yes he's super - super cute, super intelligent, even super sweet - but he's also super hard to deal with at times. The day after my last post really puts it in perspective. We were picking up something by the local mall and the kids know there's a play area there which we hadn't been to in a long time (we hadn't been much of anywhere in a long time) and since we actually had some time we figured why not we'll stop in for a bit and let them play. My husband and I chatted a bit but mostly we kept an eye on the kids anticipating when it wold happen - and sure enough it did. You see unlike other parents who can just sit and enjoy a free moment when at a park or play area of a mall, we are constantly listening for those cries of fear and pain - no not coming from our little guy, from the other kid our little boy hurt. Sometimes this cry comes from a kid a few years older and even a few feet taller than him.  I heard that familiar noise and I look over and see him attack this little girl, rip the glasses off her face and throw them across the room. As usual I'm up in a flash and over there in a bound booming his name out in my mommy voice that I really don't like to use but especially in public, and we're going home. We knew he'd be upset to leave - he hates to leave anywhere - but this time was a bit different than other times. This time we got one of his ultra mega tantrums and he screamed bloody murder so bad I had to get out of my seat in the van and go sit by him and cover his mouth so my husband could drive since we were all in super panic stress mode from the whole ordeal. Over the last few weeks there have been many sleepless nights and tears and that's just been from me and my husband. We finally are taking the big plunge into trying to figure out what makes our beloved little boy tick so to say, knowing that it's not just a phase and it's not just the terrible two's and it's not just a typical little boy being a little rough now and then.

It's been really hard and I want to cry right now even as I type.  Eli was a wonderful baby. He was quiet and sweet and not nearly as hard to handle as his sister had been as a baby. She would scream until she was red all over as a baby and this birthmark on her forehead would turn deep purple. That birthmark still changes color like a mood ring at times. Then as Eli grew up he changed. We attributed some of his outburst to not being able to talk fully yet and being frustrated at that lack of communication. Some of his first words were "I hate you!" and he screamed them incessantly at our friends and neighbors but we just attributed that to a cranky 2 year old. In our church there's a nursery the kids can go into when they hit 18 months old and then they move to primary at the beginning of the year if they've turned 3. Since Eli was born in February this meant he would have almost 3 years in nursery since he couldn't start primary until the year he turned 4. It took 1 year to get him in nursery - he pinched and bit constantly. There was a time he had bit another kid so they came and got me and I talked with him in the hall for a couple minutes and he seemed compliant so I set him down and opened the door and he went straight in and bit another kid.  He never denied it, in fact there were times where the teacher would tell us he hit a child and he would run up and say "no no, I pinch!" (Yes you may laugh - we did then and we do now, it is funny and laughing at what we can is one of our few ways of staying sane through all of this) Finally he seemed to settle in and was doing a lot better and we only had to come get him a few times here and there instead of every sunday. This year is when he turned 4 though and I've been to my own class less than 5 times since the new year as he utterly refuses to go to primary.

It doesn't help that he's always been amazingly strong. When we first moved into our house he had just turned 2 years old and he could lug a whole gallon of milk with one hand up the stairs. It may sound silly that an adult can get beat up by a 3 year old but I can attest to it as there are days where I'm covered in scratches and bruises. Even my husband who is 6'2" and somewhere over 200 pounds has a hard time when Eli goes out of control. He'll head butt you if you try to hold his arms so he can't hit or scratch or pinch and he kicks and bites. Sigh.

There's lots of other issues too. He picks at his lips till they bleed. He refuses to eat particular foods, for example when we have eggs and toast for breakfast he has to have egg whites and plain toast with no butter. I never wanted to have picky kids because I thought it was all about the parents and how they acted when it came to picky eaters - boy was I incredibly wrong. People say to be firm and not give in and that the kids will eat when they're hungry - they've never met my son. It's easy to call him my little super hero because he changes is clothes almost daily and wants to wear his super hero costume type stuff A LOT. My daughter started Kindergarten recently and we'll go to class parties and my son will just sit in a corner refusing to interact with the other kids and participate in the activities. With all of these things I've tried to work with him and often fight with him to get things to be different, to be "normal," but he can go from 0 to 100 in a millisecond, and it can be because his sister "broke his imaginary ball." Yep, that's what he told me one time when he clocked her upside the head. And if I try to get him to stop something, such as picking his lip, it makes it worse and he'll pick it all the more because heaven forbid anyone tell that child what to do.

So why is he this way? What does make him tick? And most importantly what do we do about it so it doesn't get worse? These are the questions that have racked my brain the last month and while we have a tiny bit figured out it's only the tip of the iceberg. We've considered things like Aspergers and O.C.D. and A.D.H.D. but one of the big things we are looking at is O.D.D. which is Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

-ok little rant here feel free to skip - why must we always talk in code with all these letter stuff? Tons of people will spout off some 3 or 4 letter code and it's like a different secret language. I hate that kind of stuff, part of why I will never ever text and use that whole texting language. But even more than that, why does everything that wavers beyond some indescribable "normal" have to be a "disorder?" Why can't we just say Oppositianlly defiant? Although now that I think about it, if I was to tell people, "He's O.D." I guess that can sound bad since OD typically makes people think Over Dose and drugs and all that - again we humans feel we have to shorten everything up these days. Don't even get me started on nicknames - even if you name a child a short name some people will even go so far as to just call them by the first letter of the name. - rant over now we return you to our regular scheduled program...beep...

I'm just barely getting to where I can have time to do stuff - and realizing that I do need to keep doing stuff. The last month I've spent a lot of my time and energy in this boy of mine who today I can say I love and is wonderful, but there have been many times over the last month where I was saying the opposite and that hurts more than any kind of physical pain he can put me through. I was ready to give up this blog entirely as well as a lot of other stuff feeling I would need to now devote myself entirely to the situation of my son forever but as I've was scouring through blogs and articles and essays I found a wonderful bit of advice (wish I could remember the specific thing it came from but I guess that's not as important) but the advice was to keep doing things other than taking care of your child and while I've heard that before this was coming from some parent of a child with autism or something like that, something that was even more intense than my own situation and it jerked me out of the spiraling hole I was putting myself in where I would never have any contact with the outside world ever again.  That's part of why I'm writing this - to get back into the swing of things and somehow make time for me.

As for the situation with Eli, my husband and I had felt for some time that maybe there was something up but it wasn't until that huge outburst at the mall I told you about that I honestly sat down and decided to start figuring stuff out. I had called Eli's pediatrician at some point but they just said to talk to the school district. So finally I made phone call after phone call and found the right place and made an appointment. That appointment kept me going for the next week as I anticipated the "cure" to our troubles. I felt they would tell me what was going on and while we don't want to medicate the heck out of our little guy, if we had some starting point, some guide to let us know what road to take. The big day came and I took Eli in, I filled out a long test thing which they looked over and said, "Yes we can see there's some big concerns here," then they asked more questions and asked Eli some questions then told me "He doesn't qualify for anything there's nothing we can do for you." That was it. Wait, THAT WAS IT?!! Yep. I was in utter shock. I hadn't known where to start and this had been the only thing I had found and it was nothing. I came home and laid on the couch in shock for an hour. My husband was leaving to take our daughter to Kindergarten when I had got home and from the look on my face he knew something was up so he bought me a rose and some chocolate - he's so sweet. I found out later and I really wish I had known before - the whole thing with the school district was just an assessment to see if Eli qualified for school help programs - a friend of mine went through it with her son and they told her he qualified but they couldn't say why in any way, all they could say was what programs he could do but they aren't allowed to do anything more than that.

And now my kids are awake and my son is running around pantsless so I can't share too much more.  But I'll quickly share that we have found our own kind of path we are following with Eli for now. We separated the kids room so now they each have a room instead of sharing and that has helped. I'm keeping an eye out for all of Eli's little quirks and we're being able to understand some of them better - he likes to wear pajamas all the time because he likes the tight shirts, he wants shorts all the time because he doesn't like how it feels when pants brush the tops of his feet. And I've stopped fighting. There's a lot of things I'm letting go such as the idea that he needs to wear clothes during the day and can't wear pajamas because those are only to sleep in - that's not a battle worth fighting. We also just had an appointment with our amazing friend Jan who is our "therapist" as I call her, who does Body Talk - we're into alternative stuff like that, check it out. We also have an appointment with a conventional therapist our friend goes to whose son has O.D.D. and we've been using an essential oil called Intune and that seems to have helped a bit. We're just starting on the path but those few weeks of nightmare constant tantrums that day at the mall stirred that I was afraid would be our new every day life have subsided a bit and even though he may still have nothing on but a shirt, I'm hearing my little boy play on his xylaphone upstairs instead of screaming so there has been improvement. We're just taking it one day at a time and I'm going to believe that it will get better. It has to - because I love that little guy.

Brave Birthday Party Part 1

I love theme parties. I can even go a bit overboard with theme parties like the time I did a Harry Potter birthday party for my cousin that filled an entire gym. (I'll definitely need to do a post about that one soon) but a few weeks ago I did a birthday party for both my kids. They are 2 years and 2 days apart. In fact, it was on Krissy's 2nd birthday that I went into labor with Eli. They did not want to share the day however so he took his merry ole time coming. That was not fun that cold February, especially since I do homebirths and was trying every trick to get the silly boy to come out and contractions out in the snow are not fun.

But I digress (as usual) so on to the party business! We were going to have a party for Krissy, since she is our social butterfly, complete with friends and stuff and then do a small family activity like going to the dinosaur museum type of place for Eli's birthday since he doesn't do well with crowds. However, when Eli found out it was going to be a Brave themed party, he wanted in on the fun. A lot of our friends that have kids have a daughter and a son around the same age as our kids so it actually wasn't that bad of an idea to invite the sibling pairs and just do a combined birthday party. Now our daughter just started kindergarten and she's going to this great charter school called Walden which we really love but since it's a charter school, some of the students come from a great distance - we're talking 39 miles, almost an hour drive! (that's how great of a school it is in my opinion) but due to this, I was rather unsure if some of her school friends would actually be able to make it to our house for the party with the distance factor.

So me being me, I decided to invite the school friends and some other friends we know that live farther away and even more friends that live closer. It wasn't until later that it truly sunk in that if all the children came to the party, including my two that would put oh...17 KIDS IN MY HOUSE!! Still though, I was feeling bad about not inviting other kids we know - I always hate to leave someone out - and I was even afraid to mention it on facebook for fear that someone would assume that meant they could come too and that would give us more kids, or that someones kids would want to come because I do put on a really good party if I do say so myself. But the kids we invited were the ones my kids picked out and I've done parties with almost as many kids before.

I went to use a printable fill in the blank invitation but those things never have enough space to put in everything. So I did my usual and designed one and even printed designs and names on the envelopes.   Then I set to work to figure out what activities to do and decorations to make and all that fun stuff. When the movie came out last year I had gathered a lot of pictures and information because I wanted to make a dress like the queens and we all dressed up to go to the movie. (we're a crazy family like that) Here's a picture from when we went to the movie:

Since it's been a crazy winter we had tons of snow still so I knew we would be inside which put some restrictions on what we could do - for one I knew we couldn't do normal sized bows and arrows and for two I knew we needed to have stuff to do or that many kids in a small place would  be asking for trouble. Thanks to Pinterest, and Google and my own cleverness I was able to come up with a lot of fun things and I think the party went off really well!

A few days before the party I was crazy busy trying to get everything together and then it snowed A TON and I got the crazy idea to shovel our driveway (which was pretty silly since our front yard/driveway faces south and melted a bunch the next day) but we're on a pretty busy street so I didn't want to fuss with a mountain of snow when I tried to pull out. This was a really hard and exhausting task so I was really burning out but the kids wanted to play and I decided I was going to build a snowman with them to relax a bit and not hate the snow.  Since my brain was on Brave with preparations for the party I figured I didn't want to do a boring traditional snoman so instead I did this:

Merida Snowlady!!

You can see the Merida picture I printed off for reference down in the corner

back view - she was kind of a mix between 2D and 3D

Ok, so that's a whole tone of pictures of the Merida snowlady of awesomeness but I can't help it, I'm pretty proud of it. :D The kids helped me make a big mound (it wasn't the best snowman snow so we had to pack it pretty good to get it to stick) and then I sculpted her with a butter knife (don't I rock!?) and I used a spray bottle with some water and food coloring to add the color. Her bow and arrow are some sticks we had in the backyard and her eyes are pieces of pine cone. She turned out better than I thought she would. Sadly it warmed up the next day so she didn't make it to the party but I had a lot of fun making her anyway. The kids had fun whacking the pile that was left because the color had seeped into the middle so it was white on the outside but as they hit it apart with sticks they found the color inside.

I love this action shot showing the snow flying up as Eli hit it

Thankfully due to our hobbies and interest we had a lot of Scottish/Celtic stuff already on hand so in a lot of ways putting the party together wasn't too hard. Part 2 will cover the party in all its glory with amazing decorations, theme food and fun activities - and of course more pictures!

Crazy Sock Collection

Today was Crazy Sock Day at my daughters school. This was great and dandy for us since I own about 3 pairs of "normal" socks. One time I took off my shoes around some friends and one of my friends was saying how she wondered who wore crazy socks like that and now she knew - I'm one of those people. It's gotten such that at Christmas I expect to get socks in my stocking - and my husband knows if he ever wants to get me a gift he can get me socks. So I thought it would be fun to take pictures of all my fun socks (although some must have been in the wash or awol since I couldn't find all of them) and share them!

So here's what my daughter wore today:

(I'm finding the best time to blog is after the kids are in bed so sadly I didn't get a picture of her wearing these) So one super bright neon pink sock with yellow and white stripes and then she wore two socks on the other leg, a blue one with argyle hearts and a polka dot short sock.  The polka dot sock came in a pack of 3 by LittleMissMatched which are sold as 3 different socks so if you loose one (like we always seem to do) you still have 2 and you can mix and match them.

Boy I'm embarrassed at how dirty all my socks are - but I'm pretty notorious for wearing socks around the house without shoes hence why a lot of them get holes like this.

I'm so sad when my socks get holes in them - I've never been very successful in patching them up and it's usually a favorite pair that I've been wearing a lot so it's sad to see them go.

Here's the socks I wore today - a fun Halloween pair with great stripes:

 Speaking of stripes, here's my rainbow socks and following that is my stripe socks

 

I've worn the pink and blue striped socks to church for easter. I've actually been surprised at how many people notice them and come up and tell me how much they like them.

 Here's some of the valentine socks I have.

 Here's some of the random ones I have - there's another XOXO pair I had missed with the Valentines socks and there's two pair with face-card symbols (used those when I was the Queen of Hearts for Halloween) and I love my red white and blue socks for 4th of July and the black ones on the right that look like laced up ballet shoes. Plus those polka dot ones are fun!

 Christmas socks! The pair on the right are a little hard to see but they have snowmen and snowflakes on them, plus they are my one pair of toe socks - as much as I love socks, I'm not a big fan of toe socks.

 As I was laying out the next socks one of my cats got really excited. To play with him we'll put socks over our hands and wrestle with him (it's gotten to where we put at least two socks on to protect our hands from his sharp teeth and claws) but since we started that when he was a kitten he knows socks mean play time. Thankfully he doesn't ever attack the socks when they're on our feet.

 Halloween socks! Probably my biggest section - remember to include the spider pair I'm wearing today - but all those Nightmare before Christmas ones in the middle are the newest additions I got for Christmas. It's a little hard to see but the ones on the left are spider webs and the ones on the right have candy corn. I also love the ones on the bottom right, they have little black kitty paw prints.

 I also love fuzzy socks - this is one of my fuzzy socks, the bottom one is turned inside out so you can see the fuzziness.

Here's my sock drawer stuffed full of all my crazy socks. With my personality there's times where I want to wear crazy stuff but it doesn't always work out to do so - but I can wear a pair of my crazy socks and most of the time they don't show and no one knows about it but I know I've got a flash of bright color hiding inside my shoes and it helps me feel happy.

Cherokee Quest

To me a Quest is something you work really hard on, putting all your time and thought into it until you've achieved and finished it to the end. So in some ways it wasn't the best word to use as I haven't been able to put all my time and energy into it but the word Quest also brings up images of adventure and excitement, exploring into the unknown, something noble, something great!  One of my Quests deals with family history.  It's intriguing to hear stories and learn about your ancestors and it can really help you to feel like you know who you are and have a sense of who you came from.  It can be really great to learn about the cultures of your ancestors. I knew from when I was really little that my great-grandpa had come to the U.S. from Germany so I always loved to learn about German culture and customs.  I know a lot about my Dad's side of the family, at least more than my Mom's.

It was probably about 10 years ago that I started getting more involved with figuring out my Mom's family history. My Mom's Dad, Lendon Hicks, passed away in 1999. I didn't know him terribly well, we had spent time with him but we had always lived very far away from each other. I had this desire to learn more about him and his family. Little did I know what I was getting myself into - a fun and exciting but also very time consuming and often frustrating um, well - Quest.

My grandpa Len holding me as a wee little baby

 I was in college and took some classes about doing Genealogy and the school had these great resources including, at the time, free access to Ancestry.com files. I dived in and often would find out after hours of putting in data that there was a quicker and easier way to do it, hence some of the frustration. Family History is one of those things that can really suck you in, it's a time warp where you can go four hours and you suddenly pull out of it and go, "hey, maybe I should get some food before the day is over." One of the problems with Family History is there isn't a definitive end to it. True you can get to a point going up the family tree where you can't get more information. A friend of mine was doing her family and got to Elly the barmaid, daughter of Elly the barmaid - yep not going to really be able to go past that (although I do believe that was getting back into like the 1600s). But for me I wanted to figure out about siblings and such, not just the one straight line back.  Feeling that way however can make it so Family History becomes this crazy labyrinth and you find yourself going off on this tangent path and winding and twisting all up when you realize you probably have gone a bit far off from your original path so you go back and try to flesh that path out more.

For most people when you're starting off Family History you talk to - well - family. My Mom's family has never been that close though, living far apart and living their own lives. We didn't get together for holidays or have reunions. Right after I got married in 2004, I went with my Mom and sister to Kentucky and it was like this little mini reunion as we visited with her sister and brother who hadn't been all together like that for probably 10 years. (Now mind you, there's 11 or so kids in the family but most of them are half siblings and step siblings to my mom, she has just the two, I guess you'd call them full blooded siblings, but she had a bit of a relationship with some of the other siblings also. I didn't really know there were so many siblings until just recently actually) But I just wasn't all that close to my Mom's relatives so I didn't feel like I could call them up and ask about the family. Plus after Mom's accident I couldn't really go to her for information.

I took what info I did have and just went for the Censuses and government records.  I was really getting the hang of things, how to look stuff up online and gathering all sorts of census stuff - but then I had my daughter and it's not very easy to go to a Genealogy library with a baby.  I realized being a mom of young kids I needed to set aside Family History for another time when I could do it more. This wasn't easy as there was a draw to keep finding more but I had to keep saying to myself that whole idea of there being a time and season to everything.  Yet every now and then something calls be back to it and I'll once again get sucked into it for a time before I set it aside - the Quest calls to me.

Wow, long post and I haven't even once mentioned the whole Cherokee thing. I'm sure someone's going to read a bit into it and wonder why the title is Cherokee Quest.  Well let me get to that right now.  In looking up family stuff on my Mom's side, I had heard that some of the ancestors might be Native American. I thought this was really cool since I've always liked the culture of the Native Americans - I've been drawn to the art, music, etc. and on my bedroom wall is a collection of dreamcatchers, medicine pouches and other such Native American iconographic objects that both my husband and I have collected/made over the years. (My husband doesn't have any Native American ancestors but he got attracted to the Native American culture through Order of the Arrow Boy Scout program) It seemed rational enough for my ancestors to be Native, at least in my eyes my great-grandparents had Native features, but I only had 2 pictures and a newspaper clipping to go off of and I only remember meeting them in person once.

Carlo and Edna Hicks1990

I had heard that my great-grandpa Carlo's mother was Native American but when I found her in the census she was put down as White so I didn't think much more of it. I did keep searching for more history and at one point decided to share all the census and marriage licenses and such on facebook for anyone interested.  I suddenly got friend request from relatives I didn't know and went to look something up online and found this great site that had a lot more information and even some pictures of some of my ancestors! Carlos mother, Minnie Hicks, was in that group with a few pictures and in looking up a little more online I found more pictures of her - once again to me it looked like Native American features.

Minnie Lovins Hicks picture found at findagrave.com

Minnie Hicks picture found at http://www.thecarls.com/index12.html

I added that into my information and posted more on facebook and one of my mothers cousins told me that it's specifially the Cherokee tribe that Minnie is said to belong to as well as some of Edna's ancestors and there's a good chance we are related to the current Principal Chief Michell Hicks of the Eastern Band of Cherokee, but the only connection is the last name Hicks.

Principal Chief Michell Hicks of the Eastern Band of Cherokee

In looking up on my great-grandmother Edna's line, her grandmother Elizabeth Carmack was also said to be Cherokee. One of Edna's nephews put that idea out on a forum and recently I found her father Rev. Jacob Carmack's gravestone was put up and the idea of him being Cherokee was put on a forum also. What I find interesting is the information about Jacob didn't have his daughter Elizabeth so it's more than one source.  Plus, as I've searched for more information about Minnie, I've discovered that "Minnie" is a common Cherokee name (or at least I found a variety of other Minnie's that are proven Cherokee).

In case I've lost you and this is all confusing here's a pedigree outline:

Overview - Lendon is my mom's dad. The surname Hicks, is a Cherokee name, there's a fair amount of Hicks in this list of Cherokees. (There's even more Fields in that list, which may be related to Edna, some of the names in that list match the Fields names I found here but sadly the years don't match.)  The circled people, Minnie, Elizabeth and Jacob, are said to be Cherokee.

So this is my Quest - to discover if there's any possible way to prove that there is Cherokee connections.  This is a LOT easier said than done and for many reasons. One reason is some people hid that they were Native American, as told in this story about a different Minnie (I was really hoping it was the same Minnie as mine but no such luck) that story did have the idea of the people that had Native blood being able to pass themselves off as Black but showing more of their Native look when they were older which I think shows with my Minnie.  There are some books and resources out there - but from the little I've started to look into it's not easy at all. I also had very little knowledge about the Cherokee in general.  So a few days ago when I took my kids to the library I checked out a few books! I found out the Cherokee didn't have a written language until the 1820's! I've also done just a bit more research online and while there are some that feel that even 1 drop of Cherokee blood makes you Cherokee - there are others that don't feel the same way.   (And while it may seem cliché, I've had this song stuck in my head for days!)

Sigh. There are some great websites but to view the information you almost always have to pay a lot of money. And once again there's the whole issue of time, a lot of this takes tons of time which as I said before is not something I have a lot of right now. So I'm not sure how to go about things and if I'll ever be able to fulfill my Quest.  But perhaps posting all this here will help. If you're reading this and want to see more information - the Census and other records, you can check out my facebook album.