Yep, not just a still shot! Let them experience the full effect...too bad you can't send the smell over the video. The closest thing we've done to calling off sick when we're not is to take a mental health day when my kids had service providers that saw/treated us as cash cows and would penalize us for taking any time off at all. I think we did it once. Mental health is important too. It angers me that people who do the right thing pay all the time for people who do not. Being called a liar proactively because other people lie is vile. Being asked to produce a doctor's note that costs more than your hourly wage is exploitation. I'll admit that I don't know how to stop the liars from lying.

Our state started a voluntary program where you can have a doctor, psychologist, etc. sign off that you have a communication disorder. The BMV attaches this information to the plates named on the document vs. the person, so they will know when they pull you over. Communication disorder is purposely very, very broad--it can cover a host of scenarios brought up in this thread. Just mentioning it in case others need it (Ohio, but other states might have it also).

Gifted kids tend to come from gifted parents, so...😉 Shelagh Gallagher has talked about it at homeschool convention, but I think I heard it elsewhere too.

Steak, sweet potatoes, deviled eggs, another veggie, and something for the kiddo who doesn't like steak. I think older DS is making a cake. DH is sleeping off a night shift, so we're watching church late online and spending the afternoon doing a messy craft, I think.

Especially true for gifted and 2e kids (depending on their learning issues).

I agree with this and will add that if hypermobility is an issue, you might need an evaluation for connective tissue disorders. If hypermobility is an issue, it might get better, or you might just have to teach good writing patterns and wait it out while building hand stability slowly through a variety of activities. Instruments are good for this, but the teacher will need to be aware of the hypermobility as well. We loved Miquon. It helped a great deal with the handwriting issue and was an excellent fit overall even if handwriting was not a concern.

Marfan is a hypermobility condition. It's a connective tissue disorder that is less common than some of the others. It would be better to have one of the others, unless it's vEDS (though not all presentations of vEDS are severe).

When one of my kids first tried his meds, he felt like they helped, but when the dose wasn't high enough, he would feel anxious. Upping the dose fixed it--it was basically a case of the meds making him more aware of his issues but not actually fixing them. YMMV. He also had anxiety switching from one generic to another (switching back was fine) and when he had the XR for Concerta that didn't have the OROS delivery system.

If they are testing for Marfan, this list might put you at ease or make you suspicious. https://marfan.org/dx/score/ It's one of the things they sometimes like to rule in or rule out when tall and skinny is in the mix. Feel free to PM me. My son takes magnesium for leg/body pain, and it helps quite a lot. I think sometimes the pain is muscles that are a combination of too tight and too loose due to hypermobility (the tight ones compensate for the loose ones).

https://www.nbc4i.com/news/governor-dewine-sick-with-covid-19-receiving-treatment/ I wonder if they know which variant he has since there are supposedly so few that work.

Flea bites usually start on the legs, but if no one else is bitten, fleas make sense to me. They seem to love some people and couldn't care less about biting others. (I was the one in my household that the fleas liked, so I was the canary in the coal mine if the cat or someone else's pets had fleas.) It could be viral, especially starting on the trunk (viral exanthem). One of my kids got them often--his colds and such were usually super mild, but he often would get a rash during or afterwards.

I can say with confidence that keeping my blood sugar controlled means I am less hungry. I don't know how meds might change this equation, but being less hungry is a big motivation to be careful. (It can take a few days to get used to eating differently before the hunger leaves, but it really is remarkable.) If he's too overloaded to see a pattern, making a pattern behaviorally from the get-go and observing responses might work just as well; it's just the same thing but backwards. (Starting the day with few to now carbs, eating a pretty standardized amount of carbs at particular meals, walking after meals, etc. are all patterns that could be established; maybe sticking to a consistent set of meal times would help too.) If he feels policed, that's not good, but if he thinks it's a good idea, it could feel freeing to have kind of a routine around eating (especially if there are ideas for exceptions to normal activities--some kind of backup plan for busy days and schedule disruptions). Is the doctor willing to run an A1C more frequently if testing his blood is going to be too much? I would think every 2-3 months might be good feedback if he's wanting to see what works. BTW, glucose monitors can keep track of a number of readings in a row (usually several days of them), and you can set the date/time so that you can look back and see what the readings are. It's not that he has to keep track on his own.

The way I read it was the structure of checking blood and then journaling was too much. It doesn't take a lot of time to check the blood sugar. It does help if you know how much of a serving you are eating so that you know what 16 grams of carbs vs. 32 grams of carbs does. I tried to eat similar amounts of carbs per serving, and then just compared my body's response to each food (I think of them like various sizes of Legos, lol!). Some things are really obvious for me--brown rice sends my blood sugar through the roof, but corn, not so much. I can do oat bran, steel cut oats, or my GF oat crackers (small serving), but I can't do quick oats or rolled oats--it's so bad that they are just off the table (all unsweetened). It didn't take weeks of investigation to figure that out. It was just obvious. Sometimes I can tell by how I feel, but not always. It did take some pattern recognition skills to figure out what times of day were the best for me to eat carbs. Yes, eat the salad first. Veggies blunting the effects of the blood sugar rise is meal-specific according to the article I read (which I don't think I'd be able to find again). For me, I can't eat carbs at all in the morning because my fasting glucose is already high, but that isn't what I meant in regard to the article. I eat eggs for breakfast, but recently I've been trying to do intermittent fasting, so I am just waiting to eat until lunch. I am less hungry overall if I do that. I am sure there are individual differences with regard to timing carbs. Also, I have heard that you don't want to string out a meal; you want to eat in a fairly small window of time and not snack your way to the next meal to let your blood sugar go back down between meals. It doesn't mean zero snacks, especially if you do have a big gap between meals and/or eat things that don't bother your blood sugar, but when I hear advice to eat 6 small meals per day for weight loss, I just roll my eyes. That's the best way to yo-yo my blood sugar and make me crazy hungry, lol! I put the idea out there because she asked about scheduling. It seems like a similar level of effort, but yeah, he will only do what he's willing to. I hope he finds some things he can try from the list of suggestions! I can't eat brown rice at all, though I do tolerate some GF products made with it. Fiber doesn't fix it all, at least in my case. It really varies a lot by what substance I am eating. Same number of carbs per serving with different forms of oatmeal, corn, rice, beans, etc. are all wildly different to my body (I have been gluten free for a long time--maybe ten years?).

If you're good at pattern recognition, it doesn't require journaling to see how different foods influence blood sugar. I would add more non-starchy veggies. Carbs early in the day are really bad for me. Later in the day works better. I read an article about eating non-starchy veggies before eating carbs, and the idea is that the rise from baseline after such a meal is less drastic than without eating non-starchy veggies first (and holds true for non-diabetic people too).

The three related people in my family do not bear this out. I would just keep it in the back of your mind. We have two that can do Concerta and one that cannot.

Maybe try Concerta XR, but be sure to get the one with the OROS delivery system (some generics have a different delivery system, and it's a documented trigger for some people, including one of my kids). Or try them without the XR. Sometimes the reaction is to how it's metabolized with the XR mechanism. Vyvanse is another (usually expensive) option.

@wathe, are midlevels common in your system? I know they don't necessarily decrease burnout as it can mean the doctors still get all of the really critical cases, but it does offer a kind of pressure release on volume (and some critical care--sometimes it can be done by the midlevel, but the doctor needs to pop in and verify).

I am going to note that in the US, the hospital usually employs the ER nurses, and the hospital usually contracts out with a group to staff the ED with providers. You can absolutely have a fantastic group of providers and a sucky group of nurses. Just sayin'. DH's experience in three or four different facilities has been all over with nursing, including sometimes having to do nursing's job and his too at times. Yes, and how responsive an ER is sometimes has to do with what kind it is, etc. Some are bandaid stations. Some are full out trauma places. Many are in-between. Some have lots of in-house amenities for diagnostics and interventions, and some do not (standalone EDs outside of a rural/underserved context are just...dishonest, IMHO). It also depends on when you show up--if they are super busy, they are basically required to patch up and let someone else do a better fix job even if they can fix it. If they are less busy, you might all but get surgery for a complicated suturing job if you get a PA or NP who is really good at it, and it's not busy. But they can't charge what a surgeon charges for the same suturing job, so it's more economical for them to just get something complicated closed and send you to the surgeon so they can see the next patient. That's not up to them, sadly. A number of scenarios in this thread are incompetence (or possibly new to the ER providers who are still green, but not likely), and I am sorry to hear about those. It's not necessarily representative. Generally, I think ER care is continuously improving, but it's improving for complex stuff, not so much for "urgent care" stuff even if the ERs are the only ones open 24/7.

Yikes, that's terrifying! I am glad everyone is okay. I have both bad and good stories like this. I hope you can find an economical and effective solution.

I just did that a couple of weeks ago. In my defense, the cars I'd driven previously that didn't unlock from inside have a notch, and you just pull it open (the latch inside was just to unlock it, not pop it open). Our newer car works by pushing the little door in, and then it pops open. Oops! We've had the car since last summer, but I have always had my new driver pump gas, lol!

I think the idea of building on top is good--you might eventually want to work some of the clay so that you don't have a hard layer, but you don't have to do that now or for greens. We had a garden that was partly fairly heavy clay, and if we weren't careful, we'd have carrots that hit the clay layer, and they'd break when we harvested them (even with digging). It was more economical to garden in-ground even with clay than it was to do raised beds--we tried a bit of both. Pots are also an option. People use stock troughs too if your only reason for avoiding raised beds is because it's hard to get lumber. You can get big plastic ones by Rubbermaid, or you can use the metal ones. I think they also now have oblong metal rings that look like stock tanks but are open at the bottom just for raised beds. Tap's idea of the fabric bags for a boundary is a good idea too! Here, our soil would just wash away in the rain if we didn't have some attempt at holding it in. Yes, and be careful if you compost leaves, though leaves are probably still your friend for building soil. You just have to balance them. They can make it more acidic. It might be worth testing to see how acidic it is. My parents have perfect pH, I think, and they don't have to work hard to get blueberries and other acid loving plants, but when they compost (right onto the garden in the fall), they at least used to do both wood ash (had a woodstove for heat) and leaves, so that might balance things. My grandfather used to have to lime his garden because he had a lot of leaves in his compost, and the soil was already just right without it (similar soil to my parents). He didn't have a wood stove for ash.

We had potential, and there was an F1 (I think) touchdown in IN. The storms hit there before coming here. Our thunderstorms didn't last as long as expected, which my teeth and head appreciate, as they were gearing up with aches and pains for big stuff before calming back down, lol!

I think it's benign when it's benign, and a total pain when it's not, and that's all very individual. If she doesn't have vEDS, that's good! https://www.ehlers-danlos.com/2017-eds-classification-non-experts/neurological-spinal-manifestations-ehlers-danlos-syndromes/ I didn't know it needs to be upright. Interesting. DS had an MRI for his upcoming scoliosis surgery. It's not always done, but he gets extra scrutiny because kids with his connective tissue disorder often have differences in their dural spaces (dural ectasia) that the surgeon wants to know about ahead of time. We don't have reason to think he has Chiari, but it's always nice to think weird stuff is ruled out as we family history of weird stuff, including someone with Chiari (not a super close relative, we weren't privy to testing details, and he's since passed away but made it safely through Chiari surgery).