Dear Ones,
I know we've talked about sleep some, but it's a real hot topic, so I thought I'd give it it's own spot.
Can you get the sleep thing to work? (or let her sleep with you the night before the test, if that's how she sleeps best?)
Lots and Lots of gifted kids sleep poorly! For some it's because they are terrible about winding down, for other it's because they just don't need a lot of sleep. Figuring out which situation fits your particular kid is the key. I think that a lot of us freewheeling gifted mom's really rebel against the schedual thing, which doesn't help the child sleep well. That was true of me anyway!
I was convinced that my DS11 just didn't need sleep as a baby, but I might have noticed that he drifted off just fine as long as he had skin-to-skin with me!
Anyway - welcome!
Grinity
Interesting note on sleep and giftedness! My DD9 STILL won't sleep alone and neither will many of her friends -- a fact that is there but a bit under the radar until you ask their parents.I have always been convinced that this is one her quirks -- She is very independent until-- she's not! I was TERRIFIED to sleep when I was a child.
Do you have any citations about this/
Aline
I was convinced that my DS11 just didn't need sleep as a baby, but I might have noticed that he drifted off just fine as long as he had skin-to-skin with me!
This is exactly DS2 (today is his birthday). I don't know if he's gifted or not, but he needs very little sleep.
DD9 doesn't need a whole lot of sleep either. Interesting topic.
...Whereas both of mine buck the GT trend and sleep hard and long all night, and always have. My first (The PG one) slept through the night at 6 weeks exactly (!) and my second (whose GT status is still TBD) slept through the night at 8 weeks. Both sleep something like 10 hours a night now without interruptions. It's nice.
(Sorry to all those who aren't so lucky!)
From what I've read, that much sleep is very unusual for GT kids. But DH and I were also good-sleeping GT kids, so it seems to run in the family.
I suspect there's some Darwinism happening, too, since if they'd kept me up for years like some kids do, I don't think they'd be alive today! I'm a monster without sleep!
My kids love sleep, too, Kriston.
Also a favorite pasttime for DH and me. I'm convinced that nightowls have children who are nightowls. Sleepers have sleepers. Probably too simplistic...
I think there's probably something to that, cym.
I do tend to have insomnia if I don't get enough exercise. But once I'm out, I'm out for good, and I can sleep 10 hours straight, almost without rolling over.
DH is up and down a lot, but he loves his sleep.
Hi guys,
When DD sleeps she sleeps hard and long, it's the transition and the Mommy factor. Me, too. Brain overload? Sears "high-needs"? (my ongoing conceptualization....
aline
Ah Yes Aline! Sears 'high-needs' was my mantra for years. Now I think it was a combination of 'high needs' and 'not actually getting his needs met' - who could have guessed that a 2 year old might need intellectual stimulation beyond 'just hanging out' with mom? Certianly not me!
Grinity
I was convinced that my DS11 just didn't need sleep as a baby, but I might have noticed that he drifted off just fine as long as he had skin-to-skin with me!
This is exactly DS2 (today is his birthday). I don't know if he's gifted or not, but he needs very little sleep.
DD9 doesn't need a whole lot of sleep either. Interesting topic.
Happy Brithday DS-PinkPanther!
My point was that although DS seemed to not 'need' sleep, I might have noticed that his easy drift off while in contact meant that he did need more than he was getting, just was having trouble getting there without me. I see this alot in kids who 'don't have off switches.' I would advise you to be a bit skeptical with DS's appearance of not needing more sleep than he is getting, based on my own experience of course.
SMiles,
Grinity
Grinity,
Once again, your DS reminds me of my DS. Even as a baby, he would keep himself awake (until 11:30, if necessary) until I was in the room. We tried the Ferber method, but that was a short-lived disaster. No doubt he was tired, but wouldn't go to sleep by himself. Of course, he's upstairs by himself, poor guy. I don't blame him for being scared. He seems to function tired, but he needs more sleep. There's just not enough time in the day for him to do what he wants to do, especially since so much of it is spent in school.
My mother says that I was very suspicious of any attempt get me to go to sleep when I was little. Quiet games and lullabies sent me into screeming fits. But if she sang a loud playful song (Pop goes the weasel--my fav.) especially if it included swats on the bottom and bounces, then I'd fall right to sleep.
DS was similar. Skin to skin was not enough and he thought nursing was play time. But a walk around and around the house while we chatted with him about our day, that would do the trick.
Grinity,
Once again, your DS reminds me of my DS. Even as a baby, he would keep himself awake (until 11:30, if necessary) until I was in the room. We tried the Ferber method, but that was a short-lived disaster. No doubt he was tired, but wouldn't go to sleep by himself. Of course, he's upstairs by himself, poor guy. I don't blame him for being scared. He seems to function tired, but he needs more sleep. There's just not enough time in the day for him to do what he wants to do, especially since so much of it is spent in school.
Hey Questions! Good to see you!
Glad to hear you have a protester on your hands as well:
Mind trip:
I'm visualizing all the 'I just won't give in to sleep no matter what the cost' kids picketing as they walk in ACS's circles:
Heck No We Won't Go!Heck No We Won't Go! Heck No We Won't Go!
It took me a long, long time to recognise the difference between functioning pretty well tired, and needing sleep. What kid has the gumption to fight nature? - Our kids!
Smiles,
Grinity
I can't even talk about it any more. I went six and a half years without sleeping through the night between kid 2 and kid 3. Currently, I am on day 1084 without sleeping through the night due to my youngest. I mention this in the company of people with typical kids, and they act as if I am some sort of alien.
On a good night, I am woken three times. A bad night, six.
Ugh! I don't look at you as if you are an alien, Lorel, but as if you are a saint in desperate need of pity...and a nap!
I'm SOOOO sorry!
Grinity,
You're probably right about my DS not having an off switch. He sleeps great when he's with me, and he is very high needs. He's so different from my girls, who are both really verbal. DS will play with cars and trains for hours, just rolling them around, arranging them by color, etc. I'm having to get used to this boy thing.
oooo Lorel, that is a nightmere! The reason my kids are almost 4 years apart is because I swear I needed enough sleep before I could get pregnant with #2. DS is not a sleeper. To his credit, now at age 7, once he's asleep he's generally good for 9 hours. But he'd read all night if you let him. He was always a terrible napper. He stopped napping very young.
DD3 was actually an ok sleeper as an infant. But now is requiring a lot of maintenance to get her to sleep and is still crawling into bed with us in the middle of the night (which a lot of times, means sleeping on top of me).
I put off commenting on this thread because sleep is NOT my favorite topic!!!!!
Where to begin...........DD7 never wanted to sleep, EVER, when she was a baby. I read that Ferber book too. And since I was a new mom I decided to try the thing with letting them scream themselves to sleep. I think that was the Ferber book, maybe another one.
I got a bottle of wine. Not the regular size, the real big one. DH and I settled in with a movie to let her scream.
This child screamed at the top of her lungs for three hours! I am not exaggerating.
After she was asleep I checked on her only to find she had gotten herself so upset she had vomited split pea baby food all over and was sleeping in it. Lovely, I know mom of the year right?
She was so stubborn, we have this awesome video of her sitting in her crib, refusing to lay down. She would start to drift off and fall forward slightly and then jerk awake right before she fell asleep. If I remember correctly, this went on for at least an hour.
Not so funny, both girls report that quite often they wake up in the middle of the night. DD7 especially doesn't like it and asked me if she can start taking Ambien.
Incog
DD caught on to the trick of managing her nightmares quickly when I talked to her about it a few years ago.
And what is "the trick?" I still haven't learned to manage
my own nightmares. I'd love advice. DS doesn't have them, but I do.
I never found out how long my kids could cry. I know we went over an hour, but not sure if we ever let them go all the way CIO. (Crying it out) I read Ferber, but it didn't resonate with me. Dr. Sears' Nighttime Parenting was much more helpful to me. My kids just don't seem to sleep the same way other kids do. My 7 yo still wakes up about once a week and wants me to walk her to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
Ha! DD3 has an incredible upchuck talent with heavy sobbing and has since infancy. She still does it sometimes. We never tried cry it out with that one!
Lorel and Incog,
Ferber didn't sit well with us either. We tried CIO once with DD2, and he cried for well over an hour. He would stand up in bed and shake the crib rails. He hated his crib. When we dismantled his crib and put the mattress on the floor (at about 1 year of age) he slept much better.
He still doesn't sleep great, and we don't know why. He slept from 10:00 until 5:30 last night, and that's pretty typical for him. Yikes!
acs and kcab - I don't have alot of nightmares but I do have very bad dreams on occasion. I also modify my dreams when they get too distressing. If I can't modify it enough I usually wake up and then modify it to make it not so scary or upsetting, etc.
My DS10 didn't sleep all the way through the night until he was about 3 but my DS6 slept through the night at 7 weeks! Whenever he has a bad dream now he comes in my room and sleeps in a sleeping bag we keep on the floor. When he was younger he used to come in my room almost every night but now it only happens occasionally. Thank goodness! I'm with Kriston on needing my sleep.
DS11 also talks about being able to modify his dreams, but I get the idea that they are extr-intense. Recently he said that he actually died in a dream, and why do people say that you can't. I had no idea!
Grinity
oh...sleep...
The first 4 years were very rough. As a new born the ONLY way my son would sleep was laying on his stomach. From the first hour, he screamed himself sick if put on his back. On his side occasionally worked but only for cat naps of 15-20 minutes. As a result he slep with DH and I for the first 6 months all the time. His favorite position where he would sleep for about 2 hours was on his stomach on top of either DH's or my chest. I think our heartbeats soothed him.
Needless to say, this appalled most everyone that knew about it especially the Drs who kept talking about smothering and how many children die in a family bed. Well meaning family and friends convinced us to give the CIO approach a try when he was about 6 months old. Since he could easily turn himself over, crawl and sit -up by then, we thought maybe it would work. Like some other posters, what happened was that he would cry to the point of throwing up and having an asthma attack. That didn't last more than a couple tries.
At 12 months he would climb out of the crib... I refused to make the crib a cage so we put the mattress on the floor and tried that. Well, he wasn't willing to STAY on the mattress and kept running out of his room to see what we were doing for hours after bedtime. I figured he was getting too much sleep with the madatory naps at daycare (later found out, he didn't nap there either). I ended up being one of those Mom's carting the toddler to the grocery store or Walmart at 11:oo at night hoping to get him sleepy in the car. The bright lights at the stores seemed to help also.
For the next 2-3 years, either DH or I would go up and read to him then lay with him until he fell asleep. Most nights we ended up sleeping on his floor because we would fall asleep before him.
Around 6 he decided he could go to bed in his room by himself at a reasonable time. Even now at almost 9, we have to get him going to bed with lots of protests though. He often wakes in the night. Doesn't seem to be nightmares, just wakes up and then stays awake for a couple hours thinking. Sometimes he comes and gets us, but most of the time, I only know he woke up because the bathroom light is on.
Ahh yes, letting him go to bed with a book doesn't work well if we want him to sleep. I remember a couple months ago, I let him go to bed with a book. Then I dosed off myself and forgot to go tell him to turn out his light. Around 2:00 AM he came in and asked if it was ok to start a new book... He had finished the book (easily 400+ pages) and was ready to read more. At least it wasn't a school night :P
acs - I've always had a lot of nightmares too, though they are more rare now. For me, and DD, we remind ourselves in the dream that it is a dream. Then, we're free to modify what happens. I'm not sure what it is that allows one to step outside the dream enough to recognize that it is a dream, I started doing that spontaneously and somehow DD was able to do it after I described it to her. Sort of like a watch set in my head and sometimes it gets triggered. Sometimes I have wished it did NOT interrupt, as I wanted to see where the dream was going and was unable to settle back in. This is a lame explanation, I fear.
An example is a dream of driving fast and out of control down a crazy winding road with cliffs on the side, then clearly losing it and knowing that am going over the side. Interrupt triggered, scene grey out, voice-over reminder that this is only a dream, return to dream of car plunging through the air. Then the car bounces on its tires over and over. Seems silly instead of scary, dream continues to somewhere else.
This is called "lucid dreaming" and I have been able to do it almost as far back as I can remember. Here is how Wikipedia describes this experience:
"A lucid dream is a dream in which the person is aware that he or she is dreaming while the dream is in progress. During lucid dreams, it is possible to exert conscious control over the dream characters and environment, as well as to perform otherwise physically impossible feats. Lucid dreams are known to be extremely real and vivid for those who have experienced them."
And here is what they say about them as a treatment for nightmares:
"People who suffer from nightmares would benefit from the ability to be aware they are dreaming. A pilot study was performed in 2006 that showed lucid dreaming treatment was successful in reducing nightmare frequency. This treatment consisted of exposure to the idea, mastery of the technique, and lucidity exercises. It was not clear what aspects of the treatment were responsible for the success of overcoming nightmares, though the treatment as a whole was successful."
Unfortunately, it used to control my nightmares, but does not anymore. The bad dreams are much less frequent, but, although I am aware they are dreams, I do not have the control I used to have. Sometimes I decide to wake up because I do not like how the dream is going or it is not responding as I want it to. Then I get up and walk into the kitchen to get a snack, open a drawer and it is filled with snakes. Oh, shoot, I'm still asleep. So I decide to wake up again. I wake, go find my husband who is working late in the living room. We chat for a bit and then he turns into a vampire. Oops, still asleep! So I wake up again, walk down the hall to the bathroom and the floor drops out. sometimes this will happen 8 or more times. It is terrifying.
But looking up some things for this post has actually been really helpful. I just found out about "sleep paralysis", which is clearly one of the problems I am having as I try to get out of these endless dreams. when I do almost wake up, I realize I am unable to move and feel like I'm choking to death. I didn't know this was common, but I found a lot of info on it. Here is an interesting link (it's not the most scientific, perhaps, but it is the most artistic.)
http://www.castleofspirits.com/sleepparalysis.html
At 3 months my son started sleeping through the night. He's 2 now and it's hit or miss. Last night he was wide awake at 2am. I could hear him coyly call out "Mooom..." which soon escalated to "MOM!". When I went in his room he told me he wanted to play with the computer. I told him no. Putting a dimmer switch in his room has helped a lot. I was able to get him to stop whining after I dimmed the lights and let him "read" a book.
I'm with you, Ann. We let our sons stay up as late as they want provided they're in bed with a book. No toys, no getting out of bed. They rarely stay awake longer than a few minutes.
Sleep.....what can I say...never enough of it ;-)
Our latest problem has been DS will literally read HOURS into the night. We've fallen asleep and found him reading at midnight. Right now we are letting him read his first "adult" set of books - the story of the Buddha in graphic novel format.
http://www.amazon.com/Buddha-1-Kapi...mp;s=books&qid=1203185740&sr=1-1It is chock full of mild swearing and violence! We really debated letting him read these on his own, but it's brought up a lot of good discussion and he seems to "get" it. Anyway, we've caught him reading them in the middle of the night!
He wants to carry one everywhere.
You must have fared well on the oral surgery, Kriston! Hope your DH is spoiling you. Welcome back!
Yes, I'm feeling much better. Thanks!
The Buddha graphic novels sound great! I'm going to look into the series.
Are you worried about how late he's up? How are you handling it?
I can't even talk about it any more. I went six and a half years without sleeping through the night between kid 2 and kid 3. Currently, I am on day 1084 without sleeping through the night due to my youngest. I mention this in the company of people with typical kids, and they act as if I am some sort of alien.
On a good night, I am woken three times. A bad night, six.
Yikes!
Your Post made me smile as I thought about last night. DS woke up at 11:30pm and 1:00am. He would call out to me "Mom, I want to show you something!" If that ploy doesn't work he'll try to convince me he needs his diaper changed.
DS is a high energy kid, so he's usually fine after a night or 2 of missing a couple hours of sleep. At that point, we put him in bed REALLY early and threaten to take away his books and/or his computer time. DH for some reason usually wakes up and finds him first if he's up in the middle of the night! So I usually get to miss the whole episode.
He's actually much easier than DD3 in terms of sleeping, even though he's become a bit of a night owl. That one is still driving us crazy.
The Buddha manga series is very good. DH actually bought the series for me a couple years ago. I've done a lot of reading on eastern religion/philosophy. And DH loves good manga! So whether it's really for him or me is a mystery.
I was a religion minor in college (philosophy minor, too, actually), so I love this kind of stuff!
Ann-
I'm glad that my suffering is amusing!
Just kidding- I actually laugh about it all the time with my friends. Humor is a great way to deflect pain.
This week has been a tough one. I think dd is getting new molars. I am starting to drop the ball on things. I missed responding to a friend's email in time for something to go into our homeschool group newsletter, and I also forgot to bring ds to his book club meeting. My brain is like a sieve...
DS3 is a relatively good sleeper, and I was spoiled.
DD7mo wakes up at least every 2 hours at night, and she is killing me.
Sigh, I love my sleep.
oooo Lorel, that is a nightmere! The reason my kids are almost 4 years apart is because I swear I needed enough sleep before I could get pregnant with #2. DS is not a sleeper. To his credit, now at age 7, once he's asleep he's generally good for 9 hours. But he'd read all night if you let him. He was always a terrible napper. He stopped napping very young.
DD3 was actually an ok sleeper as an infant. But now is requiring a lot of maintenance to get her to sleep and is still crawling into bed with us in the middle of the night (which a lot of times, means sleeping on top of me).
This made me laugh. The reason my girls are 23 months apart was with DD#1 I figured it couldn't be any worse because neither of us was sleeping anyway....so I figured I would get the second baby out of the way. They both started sleeping through the night at the same time at ages 4 and 2....
Sleep has been an issue here as well. DD7 was an excellent sleeper. She was sleeping through the night at 8 weeks, 12hrs a night and napped great until 18m. At that point she refused naps and refused the crib.
DD3 didn't sleep through the night until 10m. This may have been because she got tubes at this time or coincidence. Before she was sleeping through she would wake a good 3x a night. We were exhausted to say the least. She will still wonder in our room on occasion, sometimes sleep walks and we will find her in the hall, sleeping on stairs or the floor in our room. She'll on occasion cry for what appears to be no reason but she has an expressive speech delay so I'm sure there is a reason but she doesn't have the words to express it. She also has a very hard time settling down to fall asleep. It will take her at least 30+ minutes. It is so bad that we send her to bed earlier than DD7 or separate the girls until she falls asleep so she doesn't bother DD7.
DS1 has been the most exhausting baby I know! lol From the day he was born family, friends and the nurses commented on how alert and observant he was and how little he slept. He would only sleep on me or while nursing. This was our life for many many months. He is the only baby we co slept with and this lasted for 9m until he fell out of the bed and I was too scared to continue in fear he would get hurt. We tried cry it out despite not really agreeing with it but we were desperate. He would cry for at least an hour. Not sure how long he would've gone but he never calmed down just escalated. It was awful. Finally at a year we decided to try CIO again and it was better. Now he sleeps through the night but still refuses naps. Most people think I'm crazy when I say he refuses naps. I often times will drive somewhere during "nap time" and get 30-60m of peace. If he falls asleep I hang out in the car until he wakes up. It's rather pathetic lol. He is definitely a "high needs" baby. It was his high needs and sleep issues that someone suggested I look up GT characteristics of infants.
Yeah, sleep, though it’s been many years since lack of it has been an issue, it brings back some very trying and sometimes scary thoughts. I’ve two GT sons, the sleep situation with the first one had DW and I seriously pondering whether it was wise to try for child #2.
For starters, DS #1 was a month premature at birth, that didn’t help matters any, certain systems in the body just aren’t as developed. The next item, being newb parents, we failed to recognize that DS #1 was having trouble digesting the formula product we were feeding him, vomiting up about every other bottle. Then, the ear infections kicked in for about 3 years. I swear if I would have invested in Amoxicillin and Pampers I’d have been a rich man by my own hand! I remember many nights being up 45 min. / down 45 min. all night long from about age 2 years to 4 ½ years, in all seriousness, there were many a morning when I was literally afraid in the morning to drive to work because I didn’t know if I’d be able to stay awake making the commute, luckily, I always pulled to the right and stay in the right hand lane, the zip strip on the shoulder of the highway woke me up more than a couple of times. I was probably foolish on numerous occasions to even attempt to drive but the need to put food on the table for a young family was encouragement to take unnecessary and not very bright risks. You know it’s not right when in the morning you’re physically sick to your stomach from lack of sleep. Then finally the doctor giving up on anti-biotics and putting tubes in his ears, that was a HUGE difference, however, not the end of the story by any means.
Next came what I’m sure many of you are familiar with, the active mind that simply will not rest, not even past midnight, the gears simply cannot stop turning! I felt so sorry for the poor guy….but there were so many questions in his mind at the end of each day, so many things to explore, so much to ponder! It didn’t help at all that at day care the daily routine included a nap, which DS #1 did NOT need, hell, it only made it that much HARDER to get him to sleep at night. Of course the day care insisted he take a nap like everyone else, it took a couple of meetings and a threat to pull him from the day care for them to shift his nap time to play time with the older kids. (This was the start of me learning to advocate for my kids, you know what is best for them even though it may appear to be against common practice and logic) We also taught DS #1 to meditate, this helped him not only to calm his mind before bed but also calm himself when he wasn’t able to move about freely for extended periods of time like on family vacation care trips over many hundreds of miles. It was a practice he began taking upon himself as he enjoyed the mental peace which he rarely experienced.
What ended the sleep problem all together though was pretty straight forward, partially growing out of it and partially us learning to wear him out with whatever it took, swimming was great for that, jumping on a trampoline, very long walks, whatever it took. In teen years, soccer, cross country team (for a while both soccer AND cross country team in the same day), and finally a gym membership where he was free to lift / stretch / swim until his mind was completely calm….and that continues to be his refuge and stress release while he’s in college…..and now, I’ll add, he LOVES naps! Suuuuuure, NOW it happens!
I've been complaining about DD's sleep schedule forever but I forgot to update that she now sleeps 11 hours straight at night. We start our bedtime routine around 8:00 PM and she is in bed by 9:00 PM. We read about 5 picture books and one chapter book together then she falls asleep around 10:00 PM and then stays asleep until 9:00 AM.
No change in routines, diet, or anything else that I could think of except for eliminating her naps altogether but even then, it took some time for her to settle into a schedule.
The play-based preschool we finally found insists that she takes a nap with everyone else from 12:30 to 2:30. I'd be picking her up at 12:30. There is no way I'm going to stay up with her until 3:00 AM.
Old Dad, yes, I am quite familiar with being too afraid to drive from sleep deprivation. I wouldn't wish this upon anyone and I don't understand why anyone would want to have more than one child. I cannot do this all over again. We have other reasons for not having a second child but even without them, I cannot put myself through 3 more years of no real sleep while parenting DD and a newborn. Not possible.
The play-based preschool we finally found insists that she takes a nap with everyone else from 12:30 to 2:30. I'd be picking her up at 12:30. There is no way I'm going to stay up with her until 3:00 AM.
Both my kids' preschools insisted too - except after a few weeks of putting up with them kicking back and happily blab blab blabbing interesting things to the captive audience of sleepy kids, while some poor teacher helplessly shushed and patted them on the back, they finally allowed them to just stay up!
On a more upbeat note Mana, our second child, a little over 4 years after the first, was almost effortless to raise in his early years in comparison. Our eldest DS with the over active mind? He's now double majoring in Physics and Psychology, the later more to figure himself out than anything I think (laffin) He's paying for most of his own education through multiple academic scholarships.....hang in there. Silver linings and all you know!
We also taught DS #1 to meditate, this helped him not only to calm his mind before bed but also calm himself when he wasn’t able to move about freely for extended periods of time like on family vacation care trips over many hundreds of miles. It was a practice he began taking upon himself as he enjoyed the mental peace which he rarely experienced.
Old Dad, how old was your son when he learned how to meditate? When my DS3 is older, I would like to teach him. Actually it is something I need to learn. I tried it once, but my mind wouldn't sit still.
EmeraldCity, I cannot meditate either. One of my close college friends was a zen monk and he tried to help me for years but my mind refuses to be still (ADHD).
The closest thing I can do to meditation is knitting. It saved my sanity when I thought I was going to lose it when DD was younger.
Old Dad, I often hear that you get one of each (hardest/easiest) and it sounds like that is exactly what happened with your family. DD's toddler class teacher declared after spending 30 minutes with her that DD is an exceptionally strong-willed child and it's going to be very hard for us when she is young but once she is older, we won't be worrying about her much since she'd be driven and independent. I'm not sure if this "prophecy" will come true for DD but it seems to describe your DS pretty well.
The closest thing I can do to meditation is knitting. It saved my sanity when I thought I was going to lose it when DD was younger.
Mana, great idea!! When we went fabric shopping for DS's Halloween costume (he chose to be a volcano at the same time I was reading "The Explosive Child"... how apt!), I remember all the silky yarn in so many saturated colors and thinking how gratifying it would be to knit.
*OT alert*
Hmmm. You seem susceptible to yarn stash addiction. It's a dangerous path.
There are so many helpful knitting technique videos online and well-written free patterns on
www.ravelry.com these days that you no longer need to know something who is willing to teach you or take a class.
Once I got beyond the basics, I got into lace knitting. That really forced me to focus on nothing but on the pattern and my mind was calm and quite for the first time in decades. I plan on teaching DD how to knit as soon as possible and instead of story time before bed which goes on forever, we can have knitting time to slow her mind down. I'm not sure what would work for boys in a similar way.
It's also a lot of fun to knit for you child especially when he is young enough to want to wear what you've made for him. Most older children only want to wear what their peers are wearing so the window is usually rather short. If you're thinking about starting, you should join revelry. Some of the patterns might inspire you.
DS was about 8-9 when we taught him to meditate. These days, training at the gym intensely fills that place. I think anything that they can do which focuses their mind on one thing intensely helps them to temporarily rest their mind. Usually, the very active mind is darting all over the place, even a half hour or hour of it only focused on one thing (better yet to empty) is rest in comparison.
*OT alert*
Hmmm. You seem susceptible to yarn stash addiction. It's a dangerous path.
There are so many helpful knitting technique videos online and well-written free patterns on
www.ravelry.com these days that you no longer need to know something who is willing to teach you or take a class.
Once I got beyond the basics, I got into lace knitting. That really forced me to focus on nothing but on the pattern and my mind was calm and quite for the first time in decades. I plan on teaching DD how to knit as soon as possible and instead of story time before bed which goes on forever, we can have knitting time to slow her mind down. I'm not sure what would work for boys in a similar way.
It's also a lot of fun to knit for you child especially when he is young enough to want to wear what you've made for him. Most older children only want to wear what their peers are wearing so the window is usually rather short. If you're thinking about starting, you should join revelry. Some of the patterns might inspire you.
Thanks for the website referral, Mana! Now I'm really looking forward to learning and possibly even better sleep.