Overreacting

I’m sure no other parent is guilty of overreacting. My daughter can be quite dramatic and sometimes the things she says are worrisome, “Momma my legs are sore because there’s blood all over.” There’s clearly not blood all over her legs. But what does she mean? I wanted to be thorough, so I talked to some friends who helped me rule out blood clots, remembered that her infant multi-vitamin had iron in it, and googled iron deficiencies. After all, she went through a battery of blood tests between 6 and 8 months and follow up tests at a year and 2 years to check for a specific kind of anemia. I decided she needed to add iron to her multi-vitamin since she used to take a multi-vitamin with iron as an infant.  Plus Google said her cranky attitude was a symptom of iron deficiency.  (Side note: She has been taking her multi-vitamin with iron for two weeks and her cranky attitude has not been miraculously cured.)

This is just an example of me trying to track down a logical explanation to something my daughter said. Sometimes she’s being dramatic, sometimes she’s avoiding clean up time, and sometimes there is an adoption related issue. Now, I don’t think every parent should overreact or overthink a situation like me, but if you do have questions about nutritionhttp://adoptionnutrition.org is a great resource. Tapestry blogged about the website in this blog post, “Focusing on Food and Nutrition.”

In my defense, iron deficiency is possible in children from Vietnam, but at the end of the day, I was just trying to grasp a reason as to why my daughter is so cranky and why she says there’s blood all over. I’m not sure I’ll ever know what she meant by that statement (or eradicate all her cranky attitudes), but at least she likes her new vitamins.

This post also appeared on http://tapestryministry.org/blog