Category: Staying positive

Busy and happy with DIY projects

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Our kid went crazy with DIY projects — it kept her busy, creative, and distracted from the pain of cancer treatment.

Young minds (and old!) are happier when they are kept busy in constructive ways. After days of watching too much TV and iPad during the initial part of the treatment (see this post), our kid was getting increasingly bored, tired, and irritable… We realized that we needed to find new ways to keep her busy and cheerful, through the long treatment period of around a year. Thus began our venture into DIY projects!

Huge thanks to SaraBeautyCorner for her fun and engaging Youtube videos on DIY food, craft and gift ideas. Our kid loved watching them. We started picking fun projects from there, to try hands on at home.

Of course, the first DIY projects had to be food related (remember the hunger pangs from steroids in induction?). We baked our own healthy granola bars with nuts, made fruit kabobs, packed glass jars with fruits for snacks, baked ginger almond cookies, almond muffin cakes, and melted dark chocolate into different shapes — from dinosaurs to Fairy Godmothers — and had fun decorating them with different toppings.

Our six year old especially loved the Fairy Godmother chocolates. After returning from a week long hospital stay during her birthday, we celebrated by baking cakes and making these chocolates. She would close her eyes, and make a wish before eating each Fairy Godmother chocolate. The innocent joys of childhood!

As the steroid effects went away, the new set of chemo drugs during consolidation left her severely nauseated and uninterested in food. At this time, we switched to DIY craft and other projects. She enjoyed playing with modeling clay, melting crayons into different shapes, and making various patterns with melty beads.

As described in this post, she loved art related DIY projects and found them very relaxing. From drawing simple cards, to shrink art, sand art, stained glass paintings, sketches and acrylic, she enjoyed herself with oodles of art!

During the winter, coupled with chemo, her lips went dry and started cracking. As she started exploring different colored lip balms in the market, we wondered why not make our own lip balm?! She loved the idea. Thanks to the recipes from the YouTube DIY lip balm videos, we  made our very first lip balm  with simple and good ingredients (beeswax, coconut oil, beet juice for coloring). It was so simple and easy, that she made several of these and started gifting them to her friends, doctors and nurses for the holiday season. I still use the one she gave me 🙂

We owe a lot to DIY projects! Thanks to them, our kid became a busy bee, eager to try new projects. More importantly for us, she was cheerful and distracted from the painful effects of chemo.

Celebrating small joys of life

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People often get busy chasing big dreams and lofty goals — dream job, dream family, dream house, dream startup… Sometimes we get so busy that we forget to cherish the small things and celebrate the small joys of life.

Our kid’s cancer taught us that happiness is not in things outside, but in being grateful for what we have and making the best of it.

We learned to pause, savour the moment and appreciate the joy of small things… We built our own tents and pretended to camp, shredded paper into bits and made pretend snow in sunny California, talked goofy with Alexa, and did several things together — from baking, reading, art, board games, funny faces on snapchat, and silly singing to crazy dancing… This helped make our long and boring hospital stays and clinic visits more bearable.

From boring rituals to colorful jewels and stickers

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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

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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.