A Sticky Situation

A muffled scream came rolling out from Mary’s room the other night; it sounded a lot like the Peanut’s cartoon teacher in a hysterical panic.  It is not unusual for me to not understand Mary when she gets worked up, when she is muffled, upset, and crying. 

In fact, only recently can I understand her on a regular basis.  Mary has always had co-occurring conditions weaving their way in and out of her ADHD.  I have always said that she writes, like she talks, like she reads; none of which were very intelligible. 

This has been very frustrating for a clearly intelligent child, now young woman.  Just in the last year were all these seemingly separate issues put together in one diagnosis of dyspraxia.  We are finally picking up the pace of progress with a combination of speech therapy and occupational therapy.

So, the muffled panic is getting closer, and I am trying to get to Mary to figure out what is going on.  I can make out a couple words.  I am pretty good at this from years of practice. Through all the unintelligible mumbling I am pretty sure I hear, “Crazy Glue” and “Tongue.” 

“WHAT?! Crazy Glue? Tongue? You got Crazy Glue ON your tongue?!”  The answer was YES!  Yes, she had crazy glue on her tongue and behind her two front teeth. Oh, I had a lot of unanswerable questions.  Mostly unanswerable because we were rinsing her mouth out with warm water, and I was hitting the internet for the remedies.

Mary is no stranger to impulsive decision making.  In fact, when she was about 6 years old and first on medication she told me that she liked medicine, “It gives me time to think before I do things,” she said.  That was all I needed to hear.

We are talking about the toddler that cut a perfect square out of metal mini blinds with plastic preschool scissors because we told her not to raise the blinds and she HAD to see out the window in the morning.

We are talking about the girl that as a 4 year old decorated the cream carpet 3 times with royal blue fabric paint.  The last time she had to scale counters and climb up cupboards to get to where I had stashed them a good 5-6 feet above my own head. 

We are talking about the 5 year old that rolled her hair down into a comb and when she couldn't get the comb untangled cut her hair to the scalp  straight down the center of her head.

I am very much in favor of time to think before you do.

As it turns out, she was working on our de-nesting project and found the Crazy Glue under her bed.  It was clogged with dried glue; which she thought she would chew that  off and suck it out.

When we finally got around to the “What were you thinking?” question, she blurted out, “I don’t know - I am un-medicated!”

It has been awhile since we had a Mary moment - so much time that I actually thought the other day about how long it had been.  Now, I can tell you exactly how long it has been - 10 days.