Emergency Chocolate

Yes, there really is such a thing.  (Check out www.bloomsberryusa.com for options.  My personal favorite is the dark chocolate.)  And, oh, how I wish this had been my idea!  There are so many applications where this product is useful; heck – I can come up with a reason for it for just about any situation.  Brilliant concept, don'tcha think?

And I am shamelessly calling upon it today.  Just a piece, mind you (okay…two).  And it’s heaven.  I was the lucky recipient of this wonderful confection as part of a larger “Love Bucket” given to me, from my colleagues, on my birthday.  The concept of the Love Bucket is a post all in itself, and I want to do it justice, so I’ll give you those details another time.

Back to the present…

Kiddo started out doing well this morning.  We’ve been weaning him off the medication that was too heavy for his sensitive system and have had a couple of generally good, manageable days in terms of his behavior and interactions with us.  They usually come in spurts, followed by some regression, so I’m not surprised he’s having some challenges pulling himself together today.  It’s par for the course of who he is and how he operates.

Some days, it’s just such a heavy load.  Today, I’m doing a great job of remaining calm and quiet (the two most effective strategies in my parenting basket) and trying to finish the work I need to prep for class tomorrow.  And I’m enjoying my emergency chocolate.

The cause of the meltdown was because I held a boundary on his screen time.  He has a limit of how much computer, TV or Wii he can use/see/play each day, and he was just about done.  Of course, he wanted to jockey for more time and I didn’t give in, so that’s what set off WW III.

Because he has a tendency to tears things apart, we have made his room a safe space…for all of us.  There is nothing on the walls, his furniture is bolted to the wall (we don’t need any accidents on top of his meltdowns), his closet is empty (he did that one himself; I didn’t want to put the clothes back only to have the process repeated, so I left it empty) and we pull out a few choice items (blinds, CD player, and lamp) when he goes in to cool off.

Today, he got to the blinds ahead of me and tore them off but I got the other items out and tucked him safely inside.  He’s still screaming his little head off.  And there’s a part of me that finds joy in that.  Call me crazy, but to hear his screams after his rough start in life is almost satisfying at times.  The day after his birth, he had a lung hemorrhage that we were told probably meant he would die, and the doctors were puzzled that it healed “without explanation.”  I don’t need medical science to tell me how it healed; my God is bigger than any explanation.

So when he melts down like this and I’m in a good place energetically, I often chuckle to myself.  If his former pulmonologist could hear him now, I think she’d be laughing, too!  Right now, my windows are wide open and I make no apologies to my neighbors.  That’s just what it’s like in my house.  Besides…one of them has the most annoying dog who barks incessantly every time he goes outside.  I don’t see kiddo’s lung power as a worse offense than the yipper next door!

And now, just in the space of writing this and savoring the feel of luxurious, dark chocolate melting on my tongue, my house is quiet.  That means kiddo’s brain has come back “online” and he is probably taking some deep breaths.  That’s a really good thing.  It means I can go into his room in a few minutes and we can talk about what happened and determine our next steps.

The key is to wait just the right amount of time.  If I go in too quickly, he’ll just wind right up again; if I wait too long, he’ll nap out and that doesn’t bode well for bed time later.  It’s interesting to me that the amount of time it usually takes is the same amount of time as it takes for two squares of emergency chocolate to melt in my mouth.

I wonder if chocolatiers know just how much chocolate to use in their confections for exactly this reason.  Brilliant, don'tcha think?!