The Place of Possibility

I recently had the opportunity to meet with a prospective client and his wife who had been married for more than 25 years.  They had been through a lot together over the years and had always managed to make it through, until now.  They were working with a marriage counselor and were also interested in working with an ADHD specific coach because he had recently been diagnosed with ADHD.

Now, I love working with couples and I love seeing the looks on the faces of the people I help when they are suddenly able to see something familiar in a new or different way.  As I sat with this particular couple, I was rewarded with those looks several times but also confronted with an challenge that had never presented itself quite this way before.  The person rewarding me with all the looks was the wife, not the one with ADHD.  That, in and of itself, was unusual.  I am more used to connecting with the ADHDer and seeing them come to life once they realize I actually get them.  But what was even more unusual was that the husband, the one with ADHD, seemed to believe everything I said but was unwilling or unable to see how information, insight, and new ways of doing things would actually produce different results.

He was defeated.  He was there, sitting with me and his wife because it was the only thing he could think to do to try to save his marriage.  He got what I was saying.  He saw how an ADHD life could be different than the one he was living, but he had no hope left that would allow him to consider even the possibility that his ADHD life could be different.

It was heartbreaking.

Every discussion eventually led to him explaining in one way or another that what I was saying “sure sounded nice” but that “things would never be different because they have never been different before, no matter what he tried.”

I did my best to maneuver around each of the obstacles he put up in front of me but nothing seemed to change his belief that no matter what he did, things would never be different.  And then I had one of those amazing and insightful moments that I love seeing in my clients.  Here is what I learned.

When we grow up with undiagnosed ADHD we can develop a kind of armor that helps protect us from the parts of the world and the people around us who do not understand us.  Part of that armor, as least for him, was a strong defense mechanism that rejected anything hopeful.  After all, if you never believe something different can happen, you will never be disappointed if it doesn’t.

For him, these defenses kept saying “we have tried everything and nothing changes, this is no different and you don’t want to try again if you are just going to fail”.

But what I understood in that moment was that he was creating the exact situation that would guarantee the results he was expecting.  He had to room for hope because he had lost his place of possibility.

This is something we all need to have in our minds, our hearts, and our lives.  We need to preserve a place where the possibility of success, no matter how small, can reside.  When we lack this “Place of Possibility”, we have no capacity for growth, no hope for change, and most importantly, no reason to try and we all know that if you never try, you can never succeed.

If you are feeling stuck and unable to see success in anything you do, you need to create enough space to open up a place of possibility in your life, only then will you be able to make changes that will take you in the direction you want to go.

Turning Leaf Life Coaching offers coaching for ADHD and Life Transitions worldwide.  For more information, go to www.turningleafcoaching.com.

ADHD in the News – Breastfeeding May Protect Against ADHD

A new study from Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine has determined that breastfeeding may offer some kind of protection against the development of ADHD.  The study took a retrospective look at the breastfeeding history of a group of children aged 6-12.  The group included children who had been diagnosed with ADHD, siblings of these children, and children who do not have the condition.  After accounting for other risk factors, the results indicated that those children with ADHD were less likely to be breastfed than those who did not have ADHD.

When I first read this headline, I was like, “ok, we must be an anomaly then because I breastfed both my boys and they both have ADHD”.  However, as I read the articles and news reports, I noticed something important.  If you look at the results, it isn’t actually a question of breastfed or not breastfed, it is a question of how long they were breastfed.  With both boys I had to return to work within a month or two and despite my efforts, it did not take long for me to decide that trying to pump while working was never going to be a workable solution for me and my ADHD.

This meant that although I did breastfeed, it was only for a month or two whereas the study doesn’t even count it unless the child was breastfeeding at 3 months.  Therefore, my boys would fall under the “not breastfed” category. According to the study, only 43% of the children with ADHD were being breastfed at 3 months as opposed to 73% of the children without it.

If further research confirms this link and expands our understanding of why the link exists, it may provide just cause to look at how we handle maternity leave in this country.

However, I would like to mention the somewhat obvious point that since kids with ADHD are more likely to have Moms with ADHD and breastfeeding while working is an ADHD nightmare, it may have nothing at all to do with breastfeeding or breast milk or the bond created between mother and child.  It may be that ADHD moms are less equipped to handle the challenges presented by breastfeeding once they return to work which decreases the amount of time they breastfeed AND that ADHD moms are more likely to have ADHD kids.

Turning Leaf Life Coaching offers coaching for ADHD and Life Transitions worldwide.   For more information, go to www.turningleafcoaching.com.

The First Step

Over the past year I have been the lucky beneficiary of several life management lessons generously provided by the universe.

You could also say that the universe has been beating the crap out of me in an effort to help me move farther along on my life path.

But like all things, its all in how you look at it. 

In recent weeks, I have been pondering the events of the past 12 months, looking for meaning, trying to distill the sometimes random, often meaningful, frequently trying events into something usable, something tangible, something that I can grab hold of and do something purposeful with.  Here is what I found.

Awareness is the key to happiness.
Awareness is the key to self-discovery.
Awareness is both the journey and the destination.

It is at the root of everything that matters.

That is a big statement, I know.  But it needs to be.

Time and again as I delve into the depths of what it is that defines me, the one thing that breaks the pattern, opens the next opportunity, and provides a gentle nudge or a flashing neon sign to point me down the path I need to travel along has been a new sense of awareness.  It may be a gradual feeling of coming to my senses as old behavior’s that no longer suit who I am fall away.  It can be a crushing tidal wave that pounds into me, setting me adrift, and leaving me searching for shore.  It can make me feel like I am strapped into a tilt-a-whirl that has been spinning so fast I didn’t notice it was moving until it suddenly stopped and left me dizzy and disoriented.  And it can also feel like finding the last piece of the puzzle and sliding it into place creating a moment where everything is simply right in the world.

Awareness is the first step. 

It is also the last step and it makes up several of the steps in between. It is the hardest step and the easiest step and the step that will trip you up every time you take your eyes off the road.

Some might argue that awareness is the result of self-discovery, that awareness is what you get from initiating self-change.

I can only disagree.

To me, you cannot possibly hope to change something about yourself – your weight, your relationships, your job, your bad habits or your outdated patterns – until you are aware of what it is about that part of you or your life that makes you want to change it.  How can you possibly lose weight if you are unaware of why you are overweight, of what you are eating, of how your lifestyle is affecting your body?  You can sign-up for every celebrity-sponsored weight management program on the planet, pay every penny you have, and be totally committed to making the change and you will still fail over the long term.

You will fail…….Unless you can sit quietly with yourself, look deep inside, and allow yourself to be become truly aware of what is holding you back.

Only then will all the strategies and plans and goals and decisions make a difference.\

Take the first step…..

To find out how to take that first step toward your goal, contact me today.

ADHD in the News – FDA Approves Brainwave Test

This week, the FDA approved the use of the Neuropsychiatric EEG-Based Assessment Aid (NEBA) System which uses electroencephalogram (EEG) technology to record brain waves.  The test measures the ratios of theta and beta wave frequencies.  This ratio can then be used in the ADHD diagnosis process as the theta/beta ratio is often higher in children and adolescents with ADHD than in those without the disorder.  The test will not provided a definitive diagnosis but can improve accuracy when used as part of a comprehensive diagnostic interview and assessment.

This is great news for those of us with ADHD on several fronts but primarily for this one reason.  Perhaps if there is an actual diagnostic test for  ADHD it will cut down on at least some of the speculating that it is a) not a real condition b) an excuse to medicate active children.  I am also a big fan of anything that means more people with ADHD have the opportunity to get a diagnosis so that they can get on with living their lives in the most successful way possible.

Unfortunately, like all things ADHD, this test is only approved for children and adolescents but hopefully the science will soon begin to catch up with the reality that Adults have ADHD too!

Learn more about EEG Technology here

 

Turning Leaf Life Coaching offers coaching for ADHD and Life Transitions worldwide over the phone and in person throughout NH, ME, MA, and VT.  For more information, go to www.turningleafcoaching.com.

ADHD in the News – Meds Don’t Mean Better Grades

New study shows that kids who take ADHD meds don’t get better grades over time.

Makes perfect sense to me since meds alone are not enough to overcome and compensate for the challenges that ADHD puts in our path.

Meds are not magic!

They can do amazing things like help us focus, help us pay attention, make it easier to control everything from our 100 mph brains to our tapping feet to our impulsive behavior.  They can make it possible to do amazing things no one ever thought we could.

But, they can’t do any of that without the other piece of the puzzle.

The reason that kids with ADHD who take medication, on average, don’t get better grades is because they need to learn how to do all those things that don’t come naturally to them but that are made possible by the medication.

• Meds make it possible for me to focus on one thing for a long period of time.
• Meds do not also prioritize my tasks so that I am focusing on the RIGHT one thing for a long period of time.
• Meds make it possible for me to consciously choose where I am going to focus.
• Meds do not also make me choose the RIGHT thing to focus on.

Meds are not magic, but they are effective if:

– It is the right medication.

– It is the right dose.

– You have realistic expectations of what meds will do.

– You have the skills you need to do the things that the meds make it possible to do.

Medication isn’t the answer, but it is part of the solution to effectively managing ADHD.

 

Turning Leaf Life Coaching offers coaching for ADHD and Life Transitions worldwide over the phone and in person throughout NH, ME, MA, and VT.  For more information, go to www.turningleafcoaching.com.

ADHD in the News – The Impact of Meds on Substance Abuse

For years the ADHD community has believed, based on research, that taking ADHD medication as part of a treatment plan helped protect kids from substance abuse later in life.  New research has unfortunately shown this not to be the case.

A new study conducted at UCLA used previous results from 15 studies that involved more than 2,000 children with ADHD.  These children were monitored from childhood into young adulthood and the data shows that taking medication does not decrease the likelihood that someone with ADHD will have a substance abuse problem.

In fact, taking medication doesn’t impact the likelihood of future substance abuse at all.  Meaning, the risk is the same whether medication is taken or not.

Despite disproving a long held belief, this is still good news because it also shows that people with ADHD who DO take medication are not more likely to have substance abuse problems than those who don’t.  For parents who are concerned about giving their child stimulant medication, this may alleviate some of their concern.

Turning Leaf Life Coaching offers coaching for ADHD and Life Transitions worldwide.  For more information, go to www.turningleafcoaching.com.

This Just In…..Sneezing Causes Allergies

I spend a lot of time reading about ADHD.  I read news articles, blogs, research studies, books, and pretty much anything I can get my hands on.  I try to keep an open mind and make room in my world view for information and even opinions that are contrary to what I believe or that put ADHD in a negative light.  For obvious reasons, this can be very challenging.

I live in a house full of ADHD and am part of a family where we have chosen to see ADHD as just another thing about us, not a disability or a disorder.  I work with lots of ADHDers and spend a lot of time and energy helping other people see that ADHD is a lot of things but it doesn’t have to be only the bad things.

So, I know I can become defensive when presented with some study, opinion, or article that contradicts my world view – I am only human afterall, even with my ADHD superpowers.

However, I read an article recently that troubled me and I can’t seem to let it go.   I will never understand why so many people are so invested in making ADHD about anything other than having a brain that works differently.  Perhaps those who have it see that in a negative way and those who don’t have it don’t want it to be something good, since they didn’t get to have it.

Whatever the reason, I find that there is a huge amount of effort expended just trying to pin down something that in my world, we already have the answer to – what causes ADHD.

The article I am referring to looked at the relationship between sleep and ADHD symptoms.  It found that many children showed ADHD-like symptoms when they are sleep deprived and therefore concluded that ADHD must be caused by sleep deprivation.  Well, perhaps the study the article was referencing didn’t go that far but the headline of the article inferred that sleep deprivation causes ADHD.

Now, I have several problems with this, the least of which being that there is no case for causality simply because two things are happening concurrently.  But more importantly, if difficulty sleeping, which happens to cause sleep deprivation, is a well known and generally accepted SYMPTOM of ADHD, how can it also be the cause of ADHD?

And, most importantly, why doesn’t the article mention this or take this into account.

I had the same problem with this study that determined that since children with ADHD were more likely to have parents that smoked than those without ADHD that second hand smoke caused ADHD.  Even a rudimentary understanding of ADHD makes it clear why causation cannot be inferred in this case.  People with ADHD are more likely to smoke than those without it for several reasons including self-medicating and impulse control issues.  Additionally, children of people with ADHD are more likely to have ADHD than children whose parents do not have it.  Therefore, children with ADHD are more likely to have parents who smoke than children who do not have it.  But this does not mean that second hand smoke causes ADHD.  This study also failed to recognize that smoking can be a symptom of ADHD or that there is strong evidence supporting the idea that ADHD is hereditary.

To me, both of these are like saying that sneezing causes allergies since  people with allergies are more likely to sneeze than people who don’t have them.

Maybe if sleep deprivation causes ADHD all I really need is a good night’s sleep.  If only this crazy brain of mine would shut off long enough for me to find out….

Why this ADHD Mom Loves Gadgets

There was an article this week on Mashable that asked the question “Are Kids with Gadgets More Likely to Have ADHD?” and in my world, the answer is a most emphatic yes!  But unlike the article, I do not believe my children have ADHD because of their gadgets just like I don’t believe that my husband and I, who both have ADHD as well, got it from the gadgets of our time – the walkman, the atari, and the original remote control.

While there is definitely a case to be made that our society seems to be developing an attention span problem, that the diagnosis rate of ADHD is going up, and that both of these are happening in the age of gadgetry, I don’t think you can lump them all together and say there are cause and effect relationships amongst and across them.

Our societal attention span is decreasing because we have 7,000 television channels, a library worth of books, music libraries containing 10,000 songs, and well, every piece of information available on the planet that isn’t classified by some government available at the stoke of a key or the swipe of a finger.  I imagine it was a lot easier to pay attention for longer periods of time when the whole family had a single candle and the bible to keep them busy when the sun went down.   It wasn’t so long ago that you had to go to the library to get a book, you had to use an encyclopedia to do your homework, your music collection was limited to the amount of physical space in your house allocated to it, and you always cringed when you heard the President was on TV because there were only 3 channels and he was on all of them.

If there is any root cause of our societal attention problems, access to information is more to blame than the gadgets we use to access it.

The diagnosis rate for ADHD is increasing but I will always believe that is a good thing.  For starters, ADHD is a first world problem, meaning, you have to have solved most of the big problems like having enough to eat, clean water to drink, and a safe place to sleep before you care whether or not your child can sit still for 7 hours in school.  Second, I believe the reason the diagnosis rate is going up is that we understand the condition better and kids who would have previously fallen through the cracks don’t anymore.

When you consider the statistics, especially when ADHD is undiagnosed into adulthood, I would rather have 1 in 5 kids be misdiagnosed as having it than have 1 in 5 who has it not get diagnosed at all.

So, that leaves the gadgets.  The article on Mashable does a decent job of explaining how video games and the ADHD brain work together to make it possible for a family like mine to actually have dinner in a public place.  Don’t get me wrong, my children are actually very well behaved, even when they aren’t medicated and especially when you consider they both have ADHD.  But there are things that gadgets give people like us that people who are not like us will never understand.  So, dopamine and intermittent rewards aside, here is the number 1 reason why I am thankful us ADHDers have gadgets and why you should be thankful for it too.

When you live 4 seconds at a time, it takes FOREVER for your waitress to bring dinner.

 When you have one hungry child who is incapable of patiently waiting for something that feels like it will never happen, you can likely use conversation and other tactics to keep the peace.  When you have two hungry children, well, sometimes playing word games like the Pokemon Alphabet game or giving them math problems to solve in their head works as long as the waitress is fast.  But when you have four hungry people with no patience and nothing to occupy their 100mph brains –  20 minutes is an eternity.

If it’s a good day, we may be able to keep ourselves busy joking around with each other, passionately discussing physics, or planning for the zombie apocalypse.  But even on a good day, odds are that we will be too loud and boisterous not to distract you from your dinner.

If it is not a good day, well, let’s just say there is a reason the family’s favorite place to eat is the Red Apple  Buffet where no one ever has to wait for their food to arrive.

Turning Leaf Life Coaching offers coaching for ADHD and Life Transitions worldwide over the phone and in person throughout NH, ME, MA, and VT.  For more information, go to www.turningleafcoaching.com.

I Would Never Have Known I Was Fat if it Wasn’t for My Wii

Well, that isn’t actually true.  I believe I realized it right around the time that I stopped allowing people to take pictures of me on any kind of regular basis.  This of course has had the added benefit of allowing me to remain 29ish for more than a decade, at least so far as could be proved with photographic evidence.

Nevertheless, I wasn’t always fat, and yes I have the pictures to prove it.  But I can tell you exactly when I started thinking that using words like voluptuous and curvy might help men overlook the fact that there was more of me than there should be.  Coincidentally, it was also the time that my ADHD began to have the most significant impact on various areas of my life.  And it was around the time that I went from being super-active (not to be confused with hyperactive) to barely active at all.  That might seem like a lot of change all at once but I am not kidding when I tell you it all happened almost overnight.  Well not the fat part, that took time, but the changes in me that would take me from being a normal-size person to a being a plus-sized person happened in the blink of an eye and were so subtle, it would be years before I would be aware of them at all.

It all goes back to college.  In high school I was a three sport athlete that spent hours on the field before hitting the gym to teach aerobics on the side.  In college, I was a party-loving sorority girl that sometimes remembered to go to class.  In high school, I was so active I never really had to pay attention to what I ate.  In college, I kept eating that way which included nightly trips to the snack bar for mozzarella sticks and buying steak and cheese subs from D’Angelo’s with my meal points.  With that picture in mind it won’t be hard to imagine that my Freshman 15 was handily followed by the Sophomore 20 and even the half-of-Junior year 20 more.  By the time I decided to take some time off to get my priorities straight, no only was I barely getting the grades required to remain enrolled, I had gained almost 60 pounds…and started smoking.

When I look back now, I can see the devious thread of ADHD weaving through that time in my life and leaving me rapidly unraveling.  It is only now however, with 20 years of experience and understanding that I can tell you with certainty that I am fat in large part because I have ADHD.

Now before you start thinking I am using it as an excuse, I didn’t say that ADHD made me fat.  That would be an excuse.  I said I am fat because I have ADHD which is an entirely different thing, and here is why.

I am fat because:

• I have trouble remembering that I am fat
• I have even more trouble remembering to do things like keep track of my food
• If I do remember to track my food, I have trouble remembering what I ate because much of the time I eat on auto-pilot
• Eating on auto-pilot makes it difficult to change your eating habits since that requires that you pay some kind of attention to what you are putting in your mouth
• Eating on auto-pilot is also how you eat an entire box of cookies without realizing it
• Sometimes I want to eat a whole box of cookies at once, on purpose, and it is really hard NOT to do that once my brain gets all interested and realizes it is possible
• My brain is REALLY good at rationalizing away things like calories, fat grams, and cankles when there is a box of cookies on the line – I mean, it is just this once and I really haven’t eaten much today
• Rationalization is probably bad when you have a neurotypical brain but when you have a brain like mine, forget about it – if I had a dollar for every time I overindulged “just this once” because I was convinced that it had been a really long time since the last time (regardless of the actual amount of time that had passed) I would have a lot more money to buy cookies….I mean new clothes when I finally lose this weight.
• When you have an ADHD brain like me it is almost impossible to use future rewards, like the cute skinny clothes mentioned above, as an incentive to change current behavior…..There is NOW and NOT NOW and right now, there are cookies
• While most people would assume that I eat too much, that is not the case all the time
• In fact, I frequently forget to eat at all – thanks Adderall!
• While this was super-awesome in the beginning and resulted in me swiftly dropping 20 pounds, the end result it that my body, which should really know better by this point, thinks I am starving and in an effort to be helpful it stores everything I eat as fat.
• I know this because of a visit to a helpul nutritionist who explained to me in detail how bad it is to skip meals because she wasn’t buying that I forget to eat.
• When I forget to eat, it will eventually catch up to me all at once and I will eat enough for a whole day in a very short time because I am STARVING instantly and may even feel faint or dizzy
• This behavior is very similar to an eating disorder called Binge Eating…however, I think in order to have an eating disorder you have to pay a lot more attention to food than I do….I have a not-eating disorder, it is called ADD.
• Every once and awhile I do actually remember that I am fat which means I have spent the better part of the last two decades trying not to be fat anymore which, after trying all the different diets and weight loss programs, has really only made me fatter.
• Well, that isn’t exactly true, most of them work….for awhile
• I am really really good at losing weight for about 6-8 weeks
• This is because learning new things, even diet programs, is fun and interesting to my brain and when things are fun and interesting, I am unstoppable
• Unfortunately, most diet and weight loss programs lose their fun and interesting-ness after about 6-8 weeks.

So, where does that leave me?

Over the course of the 20 years since I stopped being able to buy clothes at Express, I have binged, dieted, starved, lost, gained, and not exercised my body until my metabolism was so messed up the aforementioned nutritionist actually told me that I needed to eat more, not less if I wanted to lose weight in order to convince my body it is not in fact starving so it will stop storing and start burning.

Yay me!

If you think about it though, it makes perfect sense.  I take speed to slow my brain down, why wouldn’t I have to eat more to lose weight.  If only I could figure out what I had to do in order to make a billion dollars….

The point is this….losing weight is hard, no matter who you are.  Being fat is easy, even if you take Adderall.  But having ADHD makes the hard one even harder and the easy one much much easier.  While it was all those mozarella sticks, steak and cheese subs, and cookies that got me to the place where the video game in my living room feels the need to alert me every day that I am obese…..my ADHD is what keeps me here.

Turning Leaf Life Coaching offers coaching for ADHD and Life Transitions worldwide .  For more information, go to www.turningleafcoaching.com.

Dinnertime Dilemmas in My ADD Life

I always thought I was the only one who struggled with dinner time, but after reading these tips from ADDitude, my dinnertime dilemma makes perfect sense.

Here are the biggest struggles we have and how we have (or haven’t) solved them.

1. No One Has an Opinion

This happens every time I ask what the various males in my house want for dinner.

• My husband never has any ideas because for him being asked this question immediately makes anything related to dinner hide in the back of his brain.  We think he has a bit of decision making paralysis – because there are so many options and possibilities, his brain just checks out and he can’t think of any.
• My children will either respond with the one meal they each always choose – Tacos for one, ChiliMac for the other or they will claim they don’t care.

Obviously, this means that all of the meal planning falls to me, which is overwhelming and exhausting.  Without an intervention, our dinner menu would consist of Tacos, ChiliMac, Sandwiches, and Breakfast.  If you noticed that none of those contain any sort of vegetation, you would be correct.

So, we obviously needed to do something different.

We have used various systems over the course of the years but the two that have worked the best (which really means we kind of use them and mostly follow them which is absolute success in our house).  The first is the dinner jar which is a glass jar with slips of paper that list everyone’s favorite meals plus every other meal I know how to make.  Under the dinner jar system, I would pick out 7 dinners before I went grocery shopping and buy whatever we needed for those dinners.  This definitely helped with the indecision problem listed above but it never solved our other dinnertime dilemmas.

2. Until Everyone Does

Invariably, with the dinner jar menu, we would end up having things that no one really liked and everyone would go from “I don’t care” to “I don’t care as long as it is not (insert whatever we are supposed to be having for dinner here)”.  I realized that for some of my ADHDers, this was a type of transition problem.  They didn’t know it ahead of time and didn’t respond well to having some weird meal thrust upon them at the last minute.

3. Tacos….Again?

Apparently, even in a family that loves tacos more than just about anything else, there is such a thing as too many tacos.  Unfortunately, when you have a Mom like me whose memory for important things like what I planned to make for dinner this week is akin to cheese from Switzerland, these things can happen.  The dinner jar was great for picking options and buying ingredients, but when it came to remembering that in order to have chili tonight I needed to pull out the ground chicken in the morning and then remember all day that I was making chili so that I could remember to start it when I got home, it was not helpful.  So it was back to the old standbys of Tacos and sandwiches more than it wasn’t.

So, we needed another solution.

What is working for us now will probably seem extreme for most people, but often ADHD organizational systems do seem that way to NTs.  But it is working so I will keep it until it stops working, and then I will find a different way.

I plan all our meals and do most of our shopping a month at  a time.  I find grocery shopping incredibly overwhelming so this also helps decrease the number of times I have to do it.  It has also helped us cut our grocery bill way down because we aren’t impulse buying things every other day. Here is how it works:

1. At the start of the month, I start filling in our dinner calendar (dry erase calendar board) with family favorites (including tacos).  Then I pull new recipes that I have saved in a folder in my office and add them in.  Everyone gets a chance to look it over before I finalize it.
2. I make my list in two parts.  Anything that I can buy now which includes anything that will last the month or can be frozen goes on the first list.  Produce and other things that have a shorter shelf life for the first two weeks go on the first list and for the second two weeks go on the second list.
3. I shop for the first list at the beginning of the month and then get whatever is still needed from the second later in the month.
4. The calendar is on the refrigerator where I see it all the time which helps avoid transition problems and generally helps me remember to pull things out of the freezer.

On average, we follow the calendar about 60% of the time but that’s ok because over the course of the month, we actually eat what we planned about 90% of the time.  Since we have everything on hand for almost a month of meals, we can be flexible when we need it and that doesn’t cause us to bust our grocery budget.

Unfortunately, we still have one more dinnertime dilemma that no system has fixed.

4. Crap….How is it already 7:00?

Yes, time insensitivity is a big problem in my house, especially amongst the adults.  Even though I work at home and have set a goal of eating before 7:00 PM every night, it rarely works out that way.  There are just too many other interesting things to do and before I realize it is time to start dinner, we should have already eaten.  While I don’t love the fact that we often eat at 8:00 or 8:30 PM, I can at least comfort myself with the fact that I do cook dinner every night and at least the majority of the time, there is something that was once a vegetable on everyone’s plates.

Sometimes you have to take the small wins!

Do you have any suggestions for how we can solve our last dinnertime dilemma?  We would love to hear them!

Turning Leaf Life Coaching offers coaching for ADHD and Life Transitions worldwide over the phone and in person throughout NH, ME, MA, and VT.  For more information, go to www.turningleafcoaching.com.