So glad you have your daughter! Our daughter was going to be an ivf, since we were about 6 months into the process… but then the universe moved in mysterious ways and one of my (increasingly rare) swimmers found mama gamete, and thus daughtershine was created naturally.
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Still sucks though. Have you thought about adopting (if it’s not too personal to ask - don’t feel like you need to do so here)?
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I’m a pretty open person, happy to talk about nearly anything. We are considering fostering, hoping to foster to adopt. A straight adoption would be nearly impossible, unless you know someone who wants to let you adopt their baby. And my husband is already in his early 40s. (I married someone 11 years older than me.)
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Well, whatever you decide to do, good luck. Fostering is a wonderful service to society, so if you do that, kudos. And I think that you’re daughter is lucky to have you for her mom.
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I’m pretty damn sure I’m lucky to have her. She’s 3 now, and just incredible.
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I’ll just leave this in here:
I didn’t see a “Today” in there but, it must be.
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On Saturday my 6-year-old told me that she didn’t want to live in a world where people were so mean to one another. She later escalated that to “I’m going to kill myself” and drew more than one picture of herself being decapitated, each of which prominently featured a drawing of the knife that she was killed with.
She was already being assessed with regards to her tendency to have sudden and extreme mood swings, her next appointment is next month. I’ve spoken with nurses through a provincially offered health system, I’m going to be speaking with the school-based clinic where she’s already being assessed to see if we need to take more immediate action. I’m not at all at a loss for resources, I even have training and experience assessing suicidal risk and talking to suicidal people (though not children, so it’s only peripherally applicable).
I feel like I need a concluding statement for this piece of writing, but I don’t have any conclusion at the moment.
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Just received word that a good friend of the family/distant relative died yesterday.
I really liked him, so fuck this.
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Any, hopefully good, news on this?
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Thanks for checking in, but not really. I mean, good news that she hasn’t had another really actively suicidal episode since, but I do feel like things are going downhill rather than up right now. And I’m interpreting some of her actions through a lens of suicide risk which I think is sometimes making thing worse. Like I was in a situation where I was holding her back from what I saw as a risk of her running out onto a busy street (sparing details) when I think I would have handled the situation better (more compassion, less crisis management) just a few weeks ago.
Like I said, I’m actually super-well resourced on this. I’m going to a course on emotional focused parenting this week. She’s got a pediatrician appoint in April and some sessions with a play-therapist starting in May. She’s been put on a remarkably short waiting list (2-4 weeks) for another program to help kids with mental health problems.
But short waiting lists sure feel long when it’s your suicidal six-year-old doing the waiting.
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When I’ve needed to deal with suicidal children, which has been more often than I’d like, I’ve had some success dragging them off into the wilderness away from all media and government. No phones or Internet, lots of running and hollering and jumping. Skinned knees with dirt in them.
Not trying to tell you what will work for your child, just sharing what has worked for me and mine - certainly not a cure for suicidal ideation, but a coping strategy that is low risk compared to medication and has worked for some of us.
Best wishes to you and your family; I am sure from reading your posts here that you care about your daughter, and it seems to me that’s the thing every child needs most, caring attention.
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OH wow. That is heavy. I remember reading an article about another young person who had a sort of obsession with suicide. I forget what syndrome it was called (may not have even been a syndrome), where it is like an obsessive compulsive disorder. I hope this is just a phase, though. Kids go through weird ass phases and hopefully this is just that. Though normally they are less terrifying and involve not wanting to ever wear pants or what have you. It sounds like you have a handle on getting help, so that’s good.
I came in here to bitch that I think my old laptop had it’s video card die on it. Sorta seems rather trivial now 
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I think it’s a rule of the Fuck Today thread that we don’t compare importance or one-up one another. Every fuck today is valid!
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Not sure if fuck today or celebrate, but my niece is in hospital again with abysmal hb values, a swollen spleen and esophagal varisces due to high pressure on her hepatic portal vein. It’s been a year since she got her transplant, nearly to the day, and so far all seemed well.
Her parents are in a special loop of hell.
(Sorry, couldn’t find an appropriate non-homophobe gif.)
ETA: TBC, celebrate because a) she survives until now, b) she had her biopsy and sono just some hours ago and her hb levels are stabilising since she came to hospital. Fuck today because, well, everything else.
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I responded above briefly but I wanted to come back to this. Based on family history (i.e. me, my siblings) I don’t think it’s a “phase” but some of the support we’ve gotten has really helped and I at least feel like the cloud has lifted. At least I don’t feel like I’m reinforcing her anxiety anymore like I was when I made my initial post.
Co-parent and I took a course on Emotion Focused Family Therapy that was actually incredibly helpful. It was built around principles of being permissive with emotions but strict with behaviour. Trying to make sure kids are actually experiencing their emotions rather than avoiding them or layering other emotions on top of them. Also there’s an emphasis on taking responsibility for what’s gone wrong in the relationship.
It was sort of amazing how step-by-step everything was. I followed their process for relationship repair (a four step process) and it’s not like it made every problem go away, but there were some pretty immediate changes. When she had a problem with her friends at school she talked to me about it right away where previously I don’t think she would have.
So while I’ve been like, “fuck today!” a bunch lately because of stupid stuff at work, I’ve been in, this-seems-way-more-manageable-by-comparison mode.
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This was me more hope it wasn’t a serious thing.
While I have experienced cognitive behavioral therapy, I don’t have any experience with the above, but it sounds like a sound idea. Good luck! Yes, taking tasks and breaking them town into achievable sections makes it all more doable.
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Screw these people who need guns to act out their bullshit.
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She’s back home. They are still waiting for some results, but she’s ok enough to be at home.
They are much relieved, for the moment.
But this isn’t over, of course.
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Carlisle United’s season is all but over. It is still mathematically possible to make the promotion play-offs, but they need to win all their remaining games and hope that the two three teams above them don’t get more than 3 points.
Hopefully next season then. Sunderland look like they wait for us, with the way they’ve been playing for the last two years.
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Advanced Linux Sound Architecture.
I’m not knocking the core system or the drivers. It seems like it’s pretty capable, probably well done.
I expect sound cards to be a pain, back from the days of setting the interrupts and ports just so, and then configuring the games.
I expect that generic Chinese sound dongles might be quirky.
I know that all stackoverflow type answers will be subtly, perhaps horribly, wrong.
I understand that when I’m trying to make something work in a hurry rather than expend the time to dig down into the docs, it’ll bite me.
But darn it, I’m hitting layers of cargo cult programming, and I’m still digging! All the fixes seem to be posted by people who paste something that worked for them, that they found elsewhere, but they don’t understand why. The best docs are written by previous explorers, sometimes from long ago. (Does anyone really still have a Gravis Ultrasound card?)
There have to be people out there who actually understand it, rather than copying the gestures and rituals to appease the sound spirits, but they probably keep silent to avoid being chained up as level 1 tech support.
Pffft! All I want is sound on the right channel. It’s not like I expect to really get Surround7.1 out of a $8 dongle with two jacks, one for the mic.
I have another Pi right beside it where everything works. Playing the game of “what the hell is different?” and swapping parts will probably result in two Pis without the right channel.
Oh well.
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