Month: October 2016

From boring rituals to colorful jewels and stickers

Posted hopePosted in Staying positive

 

After one month at the hospital, when we returned home, even basic habits like brushing teeth, eating on time, drinking water, walking, peeing etc became a challenge. Each day seemed to consist of a long list of rituals. It was like having a newborn baby, who was five years old…

Thanks to a wonderful suggestion from one of the nurses, we tried jewels as rewards. It worked! Our daughter loved jewels, and a jewel chart was a perfect way to motivate her to do basic chores (and eventually, choose good activities).

We bought adhesive jewels of different shapes and colors. Red hearts for “thinking happy thoughts”, pink hearts for “brushing teeth”, green stars for “eating”, pink ones for “walking”… And if she earned more than 20 jewels a day (that typically meant brushing teeth twice, drinking around a liter of water, eating 3 meals, taking medicines, walking well, pee + poop regularly… and bonus for good activities), she could pick a surprise gift from the treasure box (we made one up with items from the dollar store or such). Soon, the chart was filled with jewels. 🙂

We then asked our kid what she would like to do when she gets well. She wanted a 3 day trip to Disneyland with her best friend and family. Nothing like a happy dream or wish to look forward to, amidst the painful medications!

We went online, checked the ticket price for a 3-day trip to Disneyland, made a list of how many tickets we needed, and she did the addition and found that we needed ~2500 jewels needed to make this wish come true. We gave her a bonus of 1000 jewels for enduring her first month of hospitalization and for doing a great job with her medicines.

Our kid started working earnestly towards the Disneyland milestone. Each day of boring rituals was now converted to earning colorful jewels!

In a couple of months, after making the Disneyland milestone, she was starting to tire of jewels. At this point, we switched to reward stickers. Emoji stickers for good attitude (her favorites!), food stickers for healthy eating, space stickers for learning, sports stickers for walking, ribbon stickers for excellence — you name it, we had the sticker. 😉

We set a mix of small and big milestones. After reading for half-hour (roughly the time to read a picture book like the Berenstain bears), she’ld get a small sticker, and after reading 30 such books, she‘ld get a small trophy! She suddenly fell in love with reading books. After every book, she’ld go and pick a favorite sticker and paste it on her chart.

Her room was soon filled with colorful jewels and sticker charts! She loved it, and for us, it was a simple and effective way to help her choose good habits and activities over bad ones. Tell us what worked for you!

Too much iPad = iMad = iSad = iBad

Posted hopePosted in Staying positive

During the initial induction phase, we were ever grateful to the iPad. Hats off to Steve Jobs for inventing one of the most addictive devices for kids! The instant audio-visual entertainment from apps was hard to beat. She would spend hours on Osmo apps (tangram, numbers, word, coding), ABCmouse.com, and several gaming, cooking and other apps. But continued hours with iPad = iMad = iSad = iBad. Breaking this was key to better sleep, mobility, and well-being.

Our oncologist noted that, “The American Pediatric Association recommends not more than 2-3 hours of iPad or TV for kids this age”.

Wow, we were at the opposite extreme — our daughter was probably without the iPad for that time during the day!! That was her way of coping with the trauma and stress of being stuck at the hospital for a month…

And she wasn’t alone. Every time I took a stroll in the hospital, or saw other kids, they too seemed hooked to a smartphone or screen…

How were we going to wean her off the iPad?

As mama bear in Berenstain Bears puts it, “When you want to remove a bad habit, start by introducing good habits”. But unlike the bear family, rules wouldn’t work in this case. Instead, we tried a combination of rewards and doing fun activities together. As she was watching her iPad, I would sit by her and start coloring something funny, read an interesting book, or play puzzles like word hunt or tangram. Nothing worked the first few times… I kept trying to draw her into the activity — “what hairdo do you think we should draw for this princess?”, “what color do you think we should use?”, “could you help me with this word?”, “hmm, I can’t seem to find this word in the word hunt”, “I wonder how to make this tangram shape”… Eventually, she would join in the activity and take over the art, or puzzle, or read the book by herself 🙂

We also incentivized her with stickers and jewels for selecting good activities over iPad or TV. This paid off quite well, as described in this post. By the end of the consolidation phase, our kid was spending <3 hours/day on the iPad, choosing from a wide range of fun activities, and much happier.   

Coping with hair loss

Posted hopePosted in Helpful resources

Losing hair can be quite hard for kids… especially for girls whose favorite princesses have long hair like Rapunzel… Few things that helped our 6 year old cope with hair loss:

– Seeing pics of kids (and adults) whose hair grows back after treatment was very helpful in assuring our kid that the hair loss was temporary, and that her hair would grow back nice and long after treatment…

– Make it memorable. We visited an upscale hair salon. I cut my hair by 15” and donated it to Wigs for kids, and said, “Mommy looks very different now, but I still love you the same.” Our kid felt more comfortable and agreed to get her hair cut. The rest of the week, she kept talking about how we donated our hair to help other kids get wigs. Made her feel like a lil’ hero!

– Watch movies and read books. We watched movies like Beauty and the Beast which reinforced the message that “Looks don’t matter, it’s the heart that matters”. Kids relate much better to princesses and superheroes and hearing from them is very reassuring…

– Time for fancy caps and wigs. We had many funny caps including a puppy, monkey, pig… Our favorite was the one we made with medical gloves and emoji during a hospital stay. We didn’t try wigs, but I’ve heard a lot of folks having fun with it too…

– It’s only natural for kids to miss their hair. Our lil’ one loved combing my hair. We bought her a couple of dolls with long hair and she loved combing them over and over again!

– Find ways to laugh! We discussed and drew various crazy hairdos that our kid would like to try when her hair starts growing again. Her favorite is waterfall and spaghetti. What’s yours? (Needless to say, we all unanimously *hate cancer*)

While it’s very hard initially, you will be amazed by how quickly kids accept their new look. They may be bald, yet they are beautiful, brave and kind…