TenuredVulture wrote:

swishnicholson wrote:

The Dude wrote:looks like my coaching career starts this weekend. I'm going to assist my son's 2-3 year old soccer team. Should be fun/horrible

Just be sure to take how they play really, really seriously and you'll be fine.

Two and three year olds? Are there diapers designed for athletic activity now?

I started when I was three too. I just assumed Pele ran around the pitch with a load in his pants

If one kid bites another, is that a yellow or red card?

Depends on if they’re vaccinated or not.

Timmy grabbed the remote and put the 700 club on my television. I saw the widescreen image of Pat Robertson in front of me and yelled, “ Get off my TV Pat Robertson, you suck!” I forgot that Timmy is now imitating words pretty well.

Now I have a 16-month-old boy running around the house yelling the word “suck” over and over again, much to Michelle‘s dismay.

Anybody ever hear of PANDAS? My daughter may have it. So that's fun

phatj wrote:Anybody ever hear of PANDAS? My daughter may have it. So that's fun

wow that sounds like a nightmare

it does appear "most" won't develop permanent damage, so hopefully the treatment goes well and she recovers
hoping for the best for her

When your daughter gets knocked out in the powder puff game its nice that her best friend's dad is a doctor who happened to be at the game.

My near 3 year old is getting up at 4am now. A month before daylight savings.

Please send dunkin gift cards my way.

oh hell ya. taste the misery

Regarding PANDAS:

My daughter for the last several weeks has been having increasing anxiety about a number of things, but getting sick is the main one. (she's always been somewhat afraid of illness; she doesn't like to be around other family members if they're sick. But this has escalated in a big way. This all started, as far as we could tell, right after she did get sick -- she threw up one morning, missed school that day, but was fine the next and went to school, reluctantly. Turns out there's a kid who sits near her in class who had pneumonia, and was always coughing and even threw up in class at one point. So we're thinking OK, it's reasonable to worry about getting sick after that, but she seemed like she was overreacting nevertheless.

More recently we talked to the school psychologist about her, and the psychologist met with her and recommended to her that she practice thinking about happy things when she gets scared (which of course we had done as well). The psychologist recommended to us that we talk to our pediatrician and perhaps get a referral to a child psychologist and/or psychiatrist. We didn't do so right away. In hindsight, not a great decision on our part, but kids change so fast we felt that it was a phase that she would simply grow out of. Also the day after meeting with the psychologist our daughter went to school and her mood and general condition seemed much improved.

But it seems that was false hope. Not only hasn't she gotten better, she's gotten significantly worse. She's not sleeping well -- she's afraid to go to sleep in the first place because she might wake up sick, and once she does fall asleep, she often wakes up extremely early (one time was around 2 AM). She's afraid of taking showers because she's afraid of getting sick (???). She's very, very reluctant to go to school. She's not eating much because she's afraid of getting sick, and has lost some weight as a result. All of this is accompanied by her moping around, whimpering and sniffling, and sometimes outright crying. This all was extremely annoying when we were thinking of it as a "phase" (and truth be told it still is) and we tended to react rather impatiently to it.

Yesterday my wife took her to our pediatrician, who took this very seriously. He's the one who suggested PANDAS as a possible cause; he recommended a blood test for strep -- but she's currently running a low-grade fever and he wants it to be gone before the test, so we're loading her up with Ibuprofen in the near term. He also said that PANDAS seemed like a long shot (no tics for instance), but PANDAS or not, she clearly has serious anxiety issues and the treatment for the psychological aspects of PANDAS are pretty much the same as for the same symptoms due to other causes. So we today contacted our health insurer and got a list of nearby in-network child psychologist/psychiatrist practices. We have called several but did not manage to speak to a human once -- left voicemails and awaiting reply. Anybody recommend one who takes Independence Blue Cross?

Today she didn't go to school as, given the fever diagnosis yesterday, we inquired whether she felt up to it (with mental reservations as to whether her answer would be honest with respect to her actual physical well-being) and she said no. She seemed fine all day; spent it on the couch for the most part watching TV or playing on her computer, but these are her usual recreations when not forced to go outside or whatever. But tonight was a disaster. We told her she had to go to school tomorrow (barring actual, obvious, physical illness of course) and pointed out that her oboe lesson (which she likes) is tomorrow, and also that if she's not well enough for school, she's not well enough for the Trunk or Treat that we're planning to go to tomorrow evening (and she wants to go to that). We'll see how that goes tomorrow morning.

But after being told that this evening, she was more than usually "mopey". She had what I would call a near-panic attack about taking a shower -- only with me and my wife calming her down beforehand, and then my wife staying in the bathroom with her while she showered would she do it at all. After her shower she was not OK -- flat-out tears. I managed to get her calmed down but bedtime was brutal. My wife got into bed with her to get her to settle down but it didn't work at all; she seemed to have a full-blown panic attack, rising from bed nearly screaming about how she was scared she would get sick. She came running downstairs where I was at the time and I didn't even know what was going on. But once I got it figured out I somehow managed to get her calmed down enough to go back to bed. My wife stayed with her rubbing her back until she fell asleep which as far as I know at the moment she still is, thankfully.

Sorry to lay this all on you folks but it helps to be able to share with people who, for the most part, I don't know personally (even though I've met a few of you).

No experience with PANDAS, but much of this seems like a more extreme or perhaps persistent version of normal childhood behaviors. I think kids will often get focused on something and get afraid of it or anxious about it. The moping, the crying, the anxiety, these all seem like escalated versions of things kids normally do. Is there any chance it's behavioral?

Sorry you're having to go through this. I thought my 2 year old's unwillingness to sleep through the night was tough. Your story puts my issue in perspective.

Also, as an aside, my 7 year old has had persistent sore throats for about 8 months now. It will sometimes go away for a while, but then it seems to come back. At first I thought it was allergies because it was spring and her nose was often runny, but it's been going on long enough that I'm starting to get concerned there may be a longer term issue. She has an appointment for an immunization tomorrow (so many are required by the school), so I'm hoping to talk to the doctor about it.

Monkeyboy wrote:No experience with PANDAS, but much of this seems like a more extreme or perhaps persistent version of normal childhood behaviors. I think kids will often get focused on something and get afraid of it or anxious about it. The moping, the crying, the anxiety, these all seem like escalated versions of things kids normally do. Is there any chance it's behavioral? .

temper tantrums and minor mood swings and general anxiety over school and such are normal things kids go through
The behavior described is not within that realm even as "escalated" behavior. There are definite OCD traits at play here and chemical imbalance in brain chemostry
I hope this gets figured out and worked through Jay

Dang PJ, that is very daunting and scary. But it sounds like you are doing all the right things at this point. I will ask if out kid's psychology group has any experience in this arena- I think (but obviously not sure) that their focus is ADHD/autism. And it took my wife like 6 months to get an appointment there, too, so your experience is common in this area...

My wife managed to get an appointment this afternoon. She's probably there right now. We'll see...

Uncle Milty wrote:No reason to apologize for sharing. I can't even imagine dealing with this.

+1

best wishes to you all, j

Glad that your wife was able to get the appointment - even if it's not the "perfect" provider, it's a starting point for narrowing down the issue/cause.

The anxiety stuff is SO HARD as a parent, because as an adult, the fear seems so irrational.


WRT to PANDAS, at one point, we were able to tell strep throat was about to erupt because the tics would start. But at the same time, there were various things adding stress to the family issues. Enough to be coincidence.

Monkeyboy wrote:No experience with PANDAS, but much of this seems like a more extreme or perhaps persistent version of normal childhood behaviors. I think kids will often get focused on something and get afraid of it or anxious about it. The moping, the crying, the anxiety, these all seem like escalated versions of things kids normally do. Is there any chance it's behavioral?

Sorry you're having to go through this. I thought my 2 year old's unwillingness to sleep through the night was tough. Your story puts my issue in perspective.

Also, as an aside, my 7 year old has had persistent sore throats for about 8 months now. It will sometimes go away for a while, but then it seems to come back. At first I thought it was allergies because it was spring and her nose was often runny, but it's been going on long enough that I'm starting to get concerned there may be a longer term issue. She has an appointment for an immunization tomorrow (so many are required by the school), so I'm hoping to talk to the doctor about it.

Allergy testing is a good thing. One of the three is allergic to mold, and takes meds spring though the first couple frosts.

Today's appointment went well. Preliminary diagnosis is anxiety and depression, unsurprisingly. We'll be having weekly sessions (Fridays at 3 PM so one or the other of us will have to leave work early and take the kid out of school early) going forward. The sessions going forward will mostly be just our daughter and the psychologist and their conversations will be confidential so any feedback will have to come from our daughter. Not looking forward to that as it's always been hard to get anything useful out of her.

The doctor recommended that we get a digital thermometer for her so she can check her temperature herself (previously she'd been asking us several times a day to see if she felt like she had a fever). She checked her temperature five times in four hours between getting home and going to bed. This doesn't seem like it's going to do any good as far as helping her not obsess about illness but if it helps our sanity, I'll take it...