Yesterday for Medicine Mondays on MommyMD.org, I discussed soft neurological signs in young children. As you may remember I couldn’t find specific recommendations about when these signs should go away. In general most reports I read stated that if by school age they are present then there may be some other issues present such as learning disabilities or ADHD. Here’s a snippet

Soft neurological signs are often used to describe signs that are either difficult to obtain or interpret. It is commonly seen in immature nervous systems of very young children. Persistence of these signs beyond a certain age though may indicate a future problem with attention and/or learning disorders or other cerebral dysfunctions.

You can test your child for soft neurological signs a couple of different ways.

1. Ask your child to walk across a room on their tip toes. As they perform this look for tremors and “overflow” involuntary movements that occur with his hands and his face.

2. Ask your child to touch the tip of their finger to the tip of your index finger and then touch the tip of their nose three times. As they perform this look for tremors and “overflow” involuntary movements that occur with their other hand and their face.

At the bus stop today, I decided to test my own children to see if I could see any of these so-called signs.Miss Blue Eyes- Six had no problems with the task. But it was clearly understood that she wanted to go play with her friends. I succumbed and let her go on her way.

So I, of course, moved on to my four year old.

“Stand still sweetie. No right here.  Great! Put your finger on your nose.”

“No I don’t want to.” She retorts. (Actually this is surprising as she is usually pretty compliant. I persisted.)

“Please. Just touch your nose.”

She touches the side.

“The tip please.”

She touches the tip.

“Great! Now touch my finger.”

She reaches out with her other hand and touches my finger.

“No, with the same hand.”

She leans her head forward to touch my finger with her finger but all the while it’s still touching her nose.

“No honey, let go of your finger.”

She releases it.

“Now touch my finger.”

She leans in to touch her nose to my finger.

“No…. Touch your nose with your finger, then let go of your nose and now with the same finger reach out and touch my finger and then release your finger and come back and touch your nose.”

She executes it perfectly and I breathe a sigh of relief. Mission accomplished and I forget why we’re doing all of this in the first place.

Lesson learned- Demonstrate first and then examine.

This is for Lisa of Libelletage- one of my favorite blogs. She’s hosting a contest of your favorite holiday recipes. Here’s to you Lisa- Enjoy!

Ingredients:

• 1 cup of shortening
• 1 cup of white sugar
• ½ cup brown sugar
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 2 eggs
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 12 oz bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips

Mix the first 5 ingredients together until smooth. Combine the dry ingredients together in a separate bowl and then add to the sugar mixture. Add the chocolate chips in last.

1. The reading glasses on the table
2. The cup of tea at his side.
3. The dog waiting expectantly in the background
4. The flower behind his ear.

“Mommy! Guess what! I pulled my tooth out and it didn’t even hurt!”

Don’t you think it changes her whole little face.

BTW I love the curly whirlies around her face. She normally declares war on them and slicks her hair back or wears a headband. But today she didn’t even notice and out they escaped!

Kyla of The Journey had the best story. I never even thought about that some kids would prefer their tooth over money!

I don’t remember any of my own tooth stories, but I have a good one about BubTar! He was so excited the night he lost his first tooth, even after he was tucked into bed I kept hearing squeals of delight coming from his bedroom. I actually have it on video in this post. However, the next day he had serious seller’s remorse, he sobbed and sobbed that his tooth was gone…it went on for weeks! He was very sad about it. He’s never given another tooth to the Tooth Fairy, the money just wasn’t worth the sadness!

Well, Santa Claus pulled some strings this past Christmas and talked the Tooth Fairy into returning that first tooth to him. He was really thrilled by it. It was my favorite part of Christmas! Here is a link to the post containing Santa’s accompanying letter.

Life has been busy and I haven’t gotten to it. Then the other day I opened my email- And the perched atop the enormous pile of 2000 emails was his simple little note:

How is the photo project going Sheila?

Cheers from Western Australia.

More to come!!

We pass this bell everyday so I stopped the other and took a pic.

It’s the only surviving part of the original church destroyed in WWII.The island was hit pretty hard and the memories live on.

Medicine Mondays is here again! Please check out MommyMd.org to find out the latest installment. We are talking about

• Circumcision

• Discipline and Young Children

• Vitamins and Children

• Bug Spray and West Nile Virus

Because I am getting so many questions I am thinking of posting the questions and answers on a daily basis (on MommyMD.org ) and then offering a summary each Monday with the links to the posts.

This way you don’t wait a week to get a response to your questions. What do you think everyone?

Here’s our third installment of Medicine Mondays!

It’s near the end of my Monday and disease and pestilence still is running amok at the Cason household. My middle girl- sunshine, is still sick so off we trudged to the doctor. Again. Oh and yes I take my child to the doctor.

Thanks to Nikki- We had some good questions regarding Twitching in children and some general pregnancy questions. Here’s a snippet:

Children and Twitching

Question:

My baby does this thing a couple times a day where her left foot twitches, and when I say twitches I mean TWITCHES, it usually only happens if there is a little bit of pressure on it, like if she is pushing on my hands with her feet. What’s that all about?

To read the answer and some more questions Please go to MommyMD.org for the whole post. And thank you Nikki for the questions!! You keep me on my toes.

Please don’t let my brain get all soft and mushy when I’m not at work. Go ahead ask me a few questions. You know I live for this. -Incidently if you want to remain anonymous go ahead and email me at sheila@drcason.org and I’ll post it without mentioning who you are. I gave a shout out to Nikki because she left it in my comments where any old person can peruse!