Anxiety...

So the meds, the pain, the swelling, pretty much easy to deal with (for the most part, we all have our days). With the meds, we just make sure to stay on our schedule and then we're done. The pain and swelling, well there's not much we can do, but a rice sock seems to help. The part of all this that's hard to handle is the anxiety. Siobhan hasn't gotten a full nights sleep since we saw Dr. W almost a month ago. We asked Dr. I about it and she thinks that it's anxiety. That tends to lead to sleepless nights for us too. She also started biting her nails. She went from having normal, cute 5 year old nails-aside from her thumbs which are jacked up from all the thumb sucking-to having total nubs.

Long story short, I don't really know what to do. I have no clue how to handle the nail biting. I know that people have put hot sauce or other things on nails to prevent thumb sucking but I don't think that's the answer. Since it's most likely something psychological, is it even something that I should be worried about? I don't know. The sleeping thing though, that is having an effect on basically everyone in the family. Carson and I take turns going downstairs to talk her back into going to sleep or letting her know that she can't sleep with us. When she cries, it wakes up Audrey. When she comes up to our room, she wakes up Ethan. Really, the only one immune to it all is Mr. Will because he can sleep through a bomb going off. Anyway, when you think about her not sleeping, a compromised immune system as a result of prednisone, and the fact that we've been sharing some sort of coughing sickness and we have a very unhappy (coughing) camper.

I don't know what to do....

We've tried a few things. Last night I did some yoga with her after a friend of ours, who has an auto-immune disease as a result of a botched H1N1 shot, told us that it has really helped him. So we tried, but there was a lot of yoga poses that she couldn't do because of her stiff knee (Child's Pose, the frog one). But there are a lot of yoga with kids videos on youtube. We also did some stretching which was nice. After that we did a massage and then to bed. Last night was better. Tonight, we didn't have time for Yoga and stretching as we were finishing up chores, but we did do a back rub which calmed her down. If it works, we'll go with that for a while.