She's been seen by GP and had ultrasound etc, all fine, next stage is a bedwetting alarm which I've bought and is sitting in the drawer looking at me accusingly.
You're supposed to do it for 12 weeks to see if it works. 12 weeks of wet beds, changing pyjamas, being up in the night several times. That's an entire school term. People say start during the holidays, but which holiday should I ruin? The summer holidays, and then you can't go anywhere and you're still doing it when they start back at school (she is being assessed for LDs - ADD probably or dyspraxia, which makes the school start quite stressful although she copes really well) and the others are only one or two weeks, and they want to do a course relating to their hobby in the autumn, and then it'll be skiing in the winter... like, I know that probably the GP would tut at me for prioritising hobbies over toilet training but I feel like she deserves to be able to do things that she likes, and stuff like the skiing should help if she does have dyspraxia. And she works really hard. There's speech therapy with daily homework, the homework they are getting from the school is really quite full on (we live abroad, school starts at age 6 but it progresses very quickly) and I've got a list of things that I'm supposed to practice with her from the neurologist who's overseeing her assessment, plus a ton of stuff from school. It's also all in her second language. I'm supposed to do the following
- speech therapy practice 20 min a day
- homework at least an hour, sometimes more
- read out loud and have them read out loud to us every day
- practice memorising of numbers and spelling, 10 mins a day each
- teach them to tell the time
- give them opportunities to practice counting money and estimating
- practice counting backwards and forwards from 1 to 100
- play educational games with her once or twice a day
- foreign language speaking DH should spend at least half an hour with her 1 to 1 chatting and looking at books
- get her to help with "everyday" tasks like making the shopping list or baking cakes
I've worked it out and supposing DD could deal with all of that, I estimate that's about 3 hours of stuff a day for DD (and regular homework, reading etc for her sister is about 1.5 hours). They finish school at 2. That takes us to 5pm, assuming DD's sister can manage everything on her own which is also not very fair. Then there's the hour of speech therapy, they do ballet, and they want to go to a drawing and painting class for one hour a week, which doesn't seem like a massive ask to me. But then there's no time left at all. There's no space for having fun, just going out on your bike (oh and we also got a questionnaire from school asking how much physical activity the kids get and whether they are in any sports clubs. So IDK, maybe if we just start running from one appointment to another or something), it's just constant work. And now on top, school are having a trip with an overnight stay in the spring, so we're going to have to make a decision about whether to try the bedwetting alarm. Oh and the school is having a fundraising drive so can I bake them a fucking cake.
IDK.