In the old days when would I get that feeling, I'd pack the kids in the car, grab the credit card, and take a "field trip".
We used to take the most awesome field trips... Mesa Verde, Four Corners, the Great Sand Dunes, Mt. Rushmore, the Badlands...we traveled all over the Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska area and had so much fun.
Twice we drove over to Chimney Rock in Nebraska and followed the Oregon Trail west...
It's been a couple of years since we've taken one of those wonderful field trips... it's been that long since M has been stable enough to take that far from home.
So... since I couldn't load the kids in the car for a road trip, we decided to head down to Colorado Springs. There is a lot of cool stuff to do down there... there are cliff dwellings, lots of museums, Pikes Peak, and a lot of really beautiful places in the mountains just west of town.
This wasn't an "educational" trip though, we just wanted to have some (cheap) fun. We ended up at Focus on the Family's children's area. I don't agree with Focus on the Family's political views, but they have a nice children's area and it's free...
The kids played for an hour or so, then we had lunch at the little malt shop they have there. The kids had a great time, and it was nice to be able to forget about M's mental illness for awhile.
Here are some pics... Here's M and his buddy after putting on a puppet show for me...
and R and M doing a show in the stage (they could watch themselves on moniters mounted just above the stage!)
R coming out of their huge slide (it's three stories tall!), she was a little afraid to try the slide at first but ended up going down over and over again!! (for some reason this picture was deleted... sorry)
We finished up with lunch in the malt shop (and a shake to eat on the way home) *********************************************
I spoke to M's pdoc the other night and asked her to talk about M's situation with the only pdoc in the area who does ECT with children. I also asked her to talk to one of her colleagues, who specializes in childhood psychotic disorders, about the advisability of trying ECT. We haven't decided that it's something we want to try, but I think it's something it's time to learn more about.
My understanding is that the biggest problem with ECT is that it can wipe out memory... (sometimes the memories come back over time, sometimes they don't...) The testing we recently had done with M showed that he has virtually no working memory at all any more, which makes the memory loss from ECT seem like less of a problem it might be for someone who doesn't already have that problem...
Lots to think about.
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