ADHD Holiday Help

My friend Lisamarie is attending graduate school at a university that holds regular seminars to help people with AD/HD manage everyday challenges; they have talked about varying issues, such as studying, sleeping issues, and most recently coping with the holidays. She sent me this link to a website that hosts a number of articles about coping with AD/HD during the holidays. If you have a little person or a grown person in your life who suffers from difficulties with attention, add these articles to your holiday "to do" list. I devoured them and found them very useful.

Festival of Trees

Duncan's preschool has an intergenerational program with the local retirement community, Noble Horizons. Ever other week, the preschool kids go to Noble Horizons for activities and snacks (always, it seems, graham crackers and apple juice). Noble Horizons also hosts an annual festival of trees. Residents and local schools and business people donate decorated trees, which are displayed during the week after Thanksgiving. Then the trees are sold in a silent auction. We stopped at Noble Horizons last weekend to see the tree that Housatonic Child Care Center decorated, and Duncan tried to show us which ornaments he made. It was fun to see the wide variety of decorating styles.

Here's the HCCC tree:

And a few of my other favorites...a pressed flower tree.

A Tiger Woods tree, which probably netted a hefty profit after the scandal:

My favorite was this organic, entirely natural tree. If we didn't own so many ornaments with sentimental value, I'd be tempted to do this myself. Maybe some year I'll decorate a small tree like this one.

On our way out of Noble Horizons, we ran into none other than Santa himself! There was an awkward moment as he was dressed in his suit but carrying his street clothes, but Duncan didn't notice, and Santa took it in stride. Duncan was a little too shy to talk to him, but Santa admitted he hadn't received Duncan's letter yet. We said we'd see him this weekend (at the Amenia tree lighting). That Santa gets around. For the rest of the afternoon we chuckled about how funny it was to run into Santa at Noble Horizons. What a great way to ring in the holidays!