What Does ‘Overwhelmed’ Mean?

My in-laws came to town today.   We’re excited to have them in for a visit.   It’s also my father-in-law’s birthday.   My children are glad to see their grandparents for a few days.   We’re going to see them in two weeks for a spring break vacation in Florida at their home, but you can’t get enough of grandparents, right?

The Big Boy Update:  We had a meeting today with my son’s teachers, his Integrative Occupational Therapist and his Play therapist.   While we met over the teacher workday this morning, my mother spent some time on the playground at school with my son.   When it was time to bring him in she came with him.  

We did a lot of talking about how we can help him with his anxiety.   He had said recently that he was behind everyone in his class, notably he felt like he was the last one.   It turns out he’s not last in his class, his comment came after coming back from a week of vacation where he saw his peers ahead of him from lessons he missed while away.   He’s doing fine, but he is distracted very much from the anxiety of being overwhelmed with everything.    His teacher said it’s not intelligence—he’s very intelligent she said.   He just has a hard time settling down to do his work.

We discussed strategies for how we can best help him both in and out of the classroom.   When he came in to hear what we’d talked about we all made sure he knew we were there to help him.   He said, “I feel like I’m a good kid and a bad kid at the same time.”  His therapist said, “guess what?  We all feel like that, and that’s okay.”

He listened very carefully to what we had to say and then we asked if he had any questions with the ideas we had to help him.   He nodded and then asked, “what does ‘overwhelmed’ mean?  After explaining, he nodded again and said he thought the plan for dividing his work up into smaller lists (a day’s work plan instead of a whole week’s plan) would be a good idea.   We’re all hoping to help him.   We want him to be successful and feel comfortable in the classroom doing work.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has crazy hair.   We used to dry it after it was washed but gave up for a while.  Last night I dried it again and today it looks so nice and is much less fly-away.   She isn’t thrilled with the drying part, but I’m hopeful it will make brushing it easier for the next day until we wash it again.   We’ll see what she thinks about it when it gets brushed again tomorrow morning.