The Word for the Day

As Kari and I walked out of the Y this morning I asked Justin, our favorite front desk guy what the "Word of the Day" was. He said, Cold. BORING I told him. He said, So what is the word of the day? I told him I was counting on him to provide it so I could blog it.

He said "Diversion." I said, "What do you mean?" He replied, "You know, putting your problems onto someone else." I was momentarily offended thinking he meant that that was the purpose of my blog when all he was saying was that he had used diversion to get me to think of my own word of the day.

But looking at the definitions I realized that we often, as adoptive parents, use diversion... or at least we should. Here are the four defintions:

1. the act of diverting from a specified course

2. Chiefly Brit an official detour used by traffic when a main route is closed

3. something that distracts from business, etc.; amusement

4. (Military) Military a feint attack designed to draw an enemy away from the main attack

As adoptive parents we look for diversions from our own lives -- we find something that keeps us sane, whether it is other adoptive parents, time at the gym, good books or TV shows we enjoy, or simply taking a long walk or a bubble bath. If we do not do these things, we run ourselves ragged. We need diversions.

We also use diversions quite often with our children. Kids with ADHD are easy to divert and a meltdown can be avoided simply by changing the subject. Bart is excellent at that with Dominyk. Dominyk will head down one of his ADHD/OCD paths and Bart will ask him a totally unrelated question which makes him forget he was getting ready to have a meltdown.

In fact, we can make a lot of progress by thinking ahead and creating diversions. I'm sure you do it all the time in parenting tough kids.

So the word for today, according to Justin, is Diversion. See if you can find ways to apply that word to your lives and then let me know how it goes. It would make Justin proud. ;-)