Hop, Skip, and a Jump

So let’s talk about tics. Not ticks, as in the nasty blood sucking bugs that like to attach themselves to you. Eww.

No.

Let’s talk about tics as in, twitches, habits, blinks, hops, etc.

Olivia has…a few.

Yeah. Let’s go with that.

Some of them are mildly annoying.

Others are downright destructive.

She has to hop and click her teeth together before she sits down at the kitchen table. Then, once she perches on her chair, she has to do a quick circle before she can sit down.

Yes, it’s as exasperating as it sounds. But it’s basically harmless.

When she wants to sit down in the living room, she does the hop and the click, she snaps her knees together (hard enough that the insides of her knees are currently bruised) then she hops again and throws herself back in to the chair. She has, over the summer, claimed the recliner as her own. So that’s where she’s throwing herself each time she sits down. She’s breaking down the chair, is what I’m saying.

She’s already destroyed the foundation of the couch by bouncing onto it each time she sits.

It’s beyond frustrating.

These days, as she’d doing her hop, click, spin, snap but before she can bounce into the chair, I’ll shout in a cockney accent, “Sit like a lady!!”

It interrupts her entire routine and she usually has to start over. But she does because she’s a persistent little monster. And then, again just before the bounce, because I’m an even more persistent and bigger monster, I shriek, “Sit like a lady!!”

By this point, she’s often in the air, her body on a trajectory toward the back of the chair, where she’ll bounce and rock and break the chair a tiny bit more each time she sits down.

I realize that she probably can’t help it. But come on!! She stopped sucking her thumb and pulling her hair out when she was four years old. She’s twelve now, surely she can use some of that stubbornness to NOT do some of these things.

The hand-flapping; I don’t care. She does it when she’s stressed. It centers her. I get it.

Hell, I was a hand-flapper when I was twelve and it drove my mom insane. Each time I’d start to flap my hands anywhere near my mom, she’d tell me sternly, “Stop shaking your hands.”

And I did. Whenever I’d feel the urge to shake my hands, I’d put them in my back pockets.

But honestly, if Liv needs to flap her hands to get through stressful situations, flap away, baby. Though, the whole flapping while her hands are dripping with water is kind of annoying too.

But please stop destroying my furniture. Please. After that happens, we’ll work on using a towel to dry hands rather than the flapping of water in all directions method she currently prefers.

One tic at a time, it’s all I have it in me to address.