Starting Therapy

Just before the end of the school year last spring I got Katie started seeing a child therapist at Nystrom & Associates right here near us.  Her therapist's name also happens to be Katie (actually part of what helped me decide to choose her!), so she is known as Miss Katie in our house.  At first it was hard to explain exactly what is was I was bringing Kate there to work on.  She doesn't have the sort of meltdowns we used to have so frequently anymore.  But with all that has been going on, all the change and restrictions with living with Grandma, I thought it would be good for Katie to have someone to process it all with.  We also saw her pediatrician and got her Prozac dosage raised to 20 mg/daily since everything in our world seemed so up in the air and unsettled and there have been a lot of adjustments to go through.  

Katie likes visiting Miss Katie, especially because she is sometimes allowed to draw on her large windows with special markers! (Kate is quite the little artist!!)  At first Katie was doing a lot of complaining about things that go on at her dad's house and why she did not like going up there for his weekends.  That was hard for me to hear because there is really nothing I can do about any of that.  A change in Rob's work schedule at the beginning of the summer made some changes that I think have made things better for her now, and Rob and Mary were good enough to come down and meet with Miss Katie and Kate to talk about some of her concerns, so at least she got to feel like she was heard.

We're working on Katie taking control of her reactions when she has negative feelings, learning how to calm her body down and not over react.  She has admitted that she doesn't have the fits of temper at Rob's house that she does at mine occasionally, so we are trying to explore why that is and what we can do about it.  (My personal opinion is that she is too intimidated by Rob and Mary to misbehave around them and holds herself together out of pure fear.)  I do admit that my consistency in following through with discipline hasn't been as strong as it should be. She definitely has a knack for wearing me down, so it is a learning experience for us both.