Thursday, August 5, 2010

A quickie or two

I need to get some sleep tonight, so I can't do a long blog.  But I have some thoughts on my mind.  Excuse me if the topics jump around a bit, but I know I won't sleep if I don't clear them from my head first!

You know what having a diabetic preschooler is like?  It's like playing a game with someone who constantly changes the rules of the game.  It seriously drives me nuts some days!  Lily was doing great for a while.  We figured out that at night, when we give her a correction, we need to back off from what the Bolus Wizard tells us to give her or she'd crash.  That went on for a good month.  And then, all of a sudden, it wasn't working anymore.  She was skyrocketing all night long.  So we went to giving her the full correction.  She still woke up high.  A few weeks of getting up every couple of hours to correct her.  And now we're back to backing off of the correction during the night and she's waking up in the normal range in the morning.  Oh, how I wish we could have just a month or two where things would go just right and she'd feel fantastic and not be on the constant roller-coaster ride that is the pattern for a pint-sized diabetic's blood sugars!

20 questions....do you ever play this game with your children?  I read a blog earlier today, and I can't even remember the blog's name or anything, but it seriously worried me.  As a diabetic myself, I know I can be a bit touchy about things.  The person writing the blog was complaining about not getting enough communication from her child.  Asking the pre-teen child questions and getting the "I don't know" or mumbled answer that a child that age would typically give.  It brought back some rough memories for me.  And I just wanted to take a moment to say to all the other d-moms out there....please, please, please try to resist the urge to play this game with your child over his or her blood sugars!  "You're high? Well, how come? Did you eat something you shouldn't have?  Did you forget to take your insulin earlier?"  Etc, etc, etc.  You know how that all goes.  You analyze everything, every move, every morsel of food, everything!  As hard as it is, try to accept high blood sugars as a fact of life at times, correct them and move on.  Seriously.  As your kids get older, they will learn the consequences of their actions so much better than you could ever imagine.  But playing 20 Questions over why their blood sugars are the way they are at the pre-teen/teen stages will just make them more combative and angrier than they already are.  It's a natural state of mind at those ages, no need to add to it, right?

My last thought for the day....it's getting to be that time of year again.  The back-to-school sales are being plastered everywhere you look, summer is starting to wind down, and parents are getting ready to return to the same old school routine that they take so much comfort in.  My children aren't school-aged yet, but it still has me thinking....you know what they need to come up with next for diabetic children and their moms?  I want them to add a feature on to one of these Continuous Blood Glucose Meters.  They need to figure out a way for these meters to magically beam the numbers off to mom or dad, no matter where they may be.  How fantastic would that be?  Anytime you're worried about your child at school and what his or her BGs might be at the moment, you can just look at a little screen and it'll tell you what the BG is at the moment and if it's going up or down.  It'd be fantastic!  Maybe they can work on that before I have to send Lily off to school.  I'd say they should come up with an app for the iPhone, but I don't have an iPhone.  Still, it'd be a great feature, wouldn't it?

Oh, one last little thing.  I got the best thing in the mail today.  A thank you card from Sue.  She's the one I sent the lilac colored scarf with the flowers off to.  It made me so happy to hear that she enjoyed the scarf and was looking forward to wearing it!  Thank you cards are awesome, and so rarely used now!  Really, they're one of those things that we should all work on bringing back!

Okay, off to bed!  May you all have wonderfully peaceful, beautiful dreams and a full 8-hours of sleep!

2 comments:

  1. Heart,heart,heart the CGM beaming the number to me while Joe is at school!!! There is some serious work that could be done in the CGM dept...as far as the wireless communication from transmitter to receiver - 5 feet seems sooooo close. I would love to be able to sit rink-side with the CGM receiver to see where Joe's number is at all times...lol.

    The toddler/pre-schooler blood sugar roller coaster game is rough...been there- done that. I am enjoying the somewhat smoother numbers now that Joe is 7!!!

    Have a great day Cindy.

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  2. The toddler roller coaster is insane. I wish every mother with a toddler knew that they will ride the coaster no matter what. Those numbers are not their fault. Growing toddlers...constantly moving toddlers...semi working pancreas toddlers...it is all a part of the D monster!

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