Day 59: Yesterday's Explosion

This is a scary title on a parenting blog.

Right now you're thinking back to the time your child managed to mimic a toy chest explosion, spewing each and every item onto the floor. Or you're remembering a time when you or your child exploded in rage, grief or joy. Maybe it's conjuring up images of your child sick with the flu...enough said.

I can identify with those explosions, but the kind we experienced yesterday was of a different, much less messy kind. Jackson and I repeated two doses of the homeopathic Candida nosode. And like we often see with remedies, he went through a developmental explosion.

He's been interested in spelling since his second birthday, and in the past few weeks, he's taken a mild interest in the letter sounds. We read books about the "v" sound and others and about word building, and while he really enjoyed the books (in other words made me read them over and over), that was as far as it went.

The day he took the remedy, he came up with his first spontaneous use of a letter sound, "V. Vuh. Vere you go Daddy!" And while he wasn't quite right, it was clear the concept of how the letter, the sound and the word related had suddenly come alive to him. The fascinating thing was that we hadn't read any of those books in days.

Then last night, while I was working and paying much less attention to him than he or I wanted, he climbed up next to me on the couch and started looking at his letter puzzle. All of a sudden he was grabbing letters, most we'd never read a book or talked about, and relating their sounds to words. "S. Ssssss. Song! W. Wuh. Wow! M. Muh. Mouse!" And he kept it up all night long.

Little Scholar

This was also the first week in our parent-child class that he has chosen to do actions with the group during our singing circle time - usually he'll do them at home when it's the two of us singing, but just watch when we're at school.

Also new with this remedy are unprompted "I love yous" and "I missed yous" and tons of out-of-the-blue compliments: "Mommy, I like you just the way you are" (If that doesn't make your heart melt...!).

Of course you take the good with the bad, because an intensification of symptoms always precedes the healing. He's been dealing with fear of having things taken from him, wanting to nurse more often, struggling to respond rather than react (explode, if you will), and feeling overwhelmed and out of control for no (or little) apparent reason.

But it's beautiful to see these amazing developments come through all that chaos and to watch his body do what it was designed to do: move toward physical and emotional balance.

When we started this journey with eczema, what I wanted for him was physical healing - as fast as possible. Now that I see how this transformational process is affecting him inside as much as out, I welcome the long road. No quick fix would be worth sacrificing the whole mind and body healing he's experiencing.

Sometimes the long road seems...well, long. But it's like choosing between the freeway and the scenic route: Both can get you to the same destination, but taking the scenic route and enjoying the view means arriving calm, renewed, and with a fresh, broadened perspective instead of hurried, distracted, and with the same tunnel vision you started with.