What is a mother to do?

So for a while now we have been experiencing some crazy bad behavior from Cara and I just don't know what to do. You would think that a mother of 6 would have all the answers when it comes to children's behavior. But this is territory that I have not enter with any of my other children. Cara has always been a little fire cracker, but shy and it is just part of her personality, however a natural fire cracker mixed with high blood sugar and watch out! She is just out of control at times. I have tried time-outs, taking things and activities away, we tried positive reinforcements etc, etc, etc and still bouts of bad behavior. Screaming, throwing things, hitting people, saying mean things to people, throwing herself on the floor, ripping things out of peoples hands. For the most part every time she has an outburst like this I put her in a time-out to relax in my room, then I take her blood sugar. It is usually in the 20's. I feel so bad sometimes yelling at her for her behavior because I really don't know what she is going through and how she is feeling when she has high blood sugar. But she can not act like this.
I have good kids very well behaved kids. Everywhere we go people are amazed at their behavior and usually embarrassed at there kids behavior compared to mine because there is 6 of them and only 1 of their own. But with Cara I just don't want to leave the house anymore in fear of a huge outburst (that is really sad to say) I'm nervous that these outburst will became a habit for Cara and this will be her new normal behavior.
And don't get me started on sleeping. No matter naps or bedtime, both have never been a problem for ANY of my children except for Cara, she just will not sleep. Whenever it is time for sleep it is a fight, "Cara get back to bed" all night long! She use to share a room with her sister Kylie and we are in the process of making Cara her own room because she was keeping Kylie up all night long. We thought with Kylie out of her room she would be able to fall asleep easier, but that has not happened. It is just a lot less noisy. I'm wondering if sleeplessness is a side effect of diabetes or insulin? I can tell you that bad behavior is a side effect of sleeplessness!!! lol
So basically these are 3 main things I have working against me with Cara's behavior, !st Cara is 3 years old and with all 3 year olds you do expect a LITTLE bit of fussiness, 2nd Cara has very little sleep at night, and she wakes up so early, so she is tired all day long and 3rd Cara BG numbers have been quit high during the late mornings for a while now and that is when I see the most problems with her behavior. I wish I could just snap my fingers and get my sweet little Cara back......where did she go?

I also was reading all the blogs today about how school is fast approaching and my stomach was doing back flips, I thought that I might just puke. This will be Cara's first year of school J.K. (Jr. Kindergarten) and boy if she thinks that she will be acting like she is acting at home she will be kick out her first week of school! lol (but not really)

What is a mother to do? :) Just keep swimming !!

A break from diabetes

Today I had an amazing day, a small but needed break from diabetes. No checking blood sugar before eating or during exercise or because something just does not seem right, no insulin shots, no worrying about the amount of carbs in food, no worrying about blood sugar levels while children are playing, no crying over needles, no watching the clock to see if it is snack time, no fighting over injection sites, no measuring....I think that I could go on all day.
Today was an amazing day, Nana took Cara for a play date and sleep over. The second that they pulled away an elephant was lifted off my chest. I felt like I could breath again! Wow sometimes you just don't realized how stressed you are until you get a break for your reality. Thank you Nana for the break from my reality, I only wish and hope that one day Cara can have this experience in her reality with a cure!
Keep on Keeping on moms, we are all doing a great job with our reality and for all the brave and super tough kids with diabetes as your reality you really truly are amazing :)

Reeses is home!

Our big family just got a little bigger. Reeses is home or Reesey I like to call her. She is our newest addition to our already big family.

I have always loved dogs and I grew up with an amazing black lab as a child so I always knew that I would have a dog in my family. One day I was reading blogs on juvenation.org about how peoples own dogs not trained dogs were alerting them to high and low BG. Wow amazing I thought to myself! That is when I started looking for and reading about alert dogs for diabetics. There is actually centers that train dogs to work and alert diabetics if their BG is high or low. The only problem was that every site that I found was American, I could not find one that was remotely close to me or even in Canada. So I just stopped looking and kinda gave up on the idea. One day I was looking through adds on Kijiji (a site just like craigslist) and I found an add puppies for sale, Airedale Golden Retriever mix and I just could not stop thinking about these puppies, almost like someone was trying to tell me something. I have always heard people say if the universe is trying to tell you something you should listen and I think this is what it was! I have always looked on kijiji at the puppies just for fun but something about these puppies, they were not the cutes, they were not the cheapest, there really was nothing special about them, but just something about them I knew that we needed to have one. So I thought maybe I could train this new little puppy myself to be our alert dog. The only major issues is that my 7 year old son Connor has a major allergy to dogs. We brought him, Cara and Kylie out to see the puppies and had him hold her and play with her with no major reaction. The breeder said we could take her home for a few days and see how Connor does with her and if there is any major issues we could bring her back (ya right). So that is where we are today, Connor has had only two bouts of itchy eyes and that is all. I'm hoping that this works out for us and she can become and very important and loved member of our family!

Long time no blog!

O' My, finally I have a second to blog and try to catch up with all my D bloggers. It is so funny because I have never met any of you but I think of all of you every day, some days even more....truly I do!

So the summer has just been out of control and so has Cara's blood sugar. She is high, high and high. I think that she is averaging in the low 20's for the last little while. As I try to read all my other D bloggers blogs I see that many of you are having the same difficulty as we are. Is it the sun, heat or just the excitement of the summer time? Our clinic told us to watch for lows during the summer because of her activity level not highs! Boy O Boy

Another common theme I see is high ketones and I have a question, does everyone check for ketones on a daily basis? I'm not sure if this is a Canadian thing or just something my clinic says, but we were told that we do not have to check ketones everyday. Only on sick days do we check them. Our diabetes clinic said that if she drinks fluids through out the day and she is not sick there is no need to check ketones "you have enough things to do and check during the day" they told us. So we have not checked Cara's ketones once since she has been diagnosed (Feb 09). Another side note about ketones, my 7 year old son Connor was just hospitalized recently with a virus and he was very dehydrated (he is fine now) and I over heard the nurse talking on the phone to another nurse and he had ketones present in his system and he is not diabetic.

So we are not doing anything special for the summer, we have no special vacation planned. We are just trying to get our house in order (moving rooms around, painting, re- doing floors) and we are all just hanging out. I'm trying desperately to keep 6 children entertained all day every day! My husband has started a new business recently and it seems like it is just me and the kids most of the time now. I'm so tired by the end of the day I go straight to bed with no blogging time. So I hope everyone is having a wonderful and safe summer! :) I will try to keep better taps on everyone because it is truly a wonderful stress release to blog and to read all other blogs. Knowing that there are other people going through what you are and being able to share with people who understand what you are going through is really amazing! Thanks for reading and thanks for blogging .... until next blog time!

p.s. without blogging poor facebook gets updates like this: Nicole

is so sick of Diabetes....so frustrating!!

~nothing to bad just high BG #'s for NO reason for a couple days now, on top of hating counting carbs, on top of hating charting everything, on top of hating watching the clock to see if it is time to check her BG or time for snack, on top of bad behavior (I think do to the high BG) and so on and so on ( I sure you know what I mean) just hating everything about diabetes today....IT IS SO FRUSTRATING!!