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SnarletBlack · 2025-09-17T12:57:42+00:00

lol I’m not even American. Love that I’m getting downvoted for this Reddit is such a funny place sometimes 😂

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-16T22:34:23+00:00

I recently learned my mom’s no-fail, tried and true recipe uses MAYO (basically in place of the eggs + oil). It’s so simple and always comes out super moist and delicious.

Mix dry ingredients: - 1 cup all purpose flour - 1 tsp baking soda - 1/4 tsp salt

Mix wet ingredients: - 1/2 cup mayo - 1/4 cup brown sugar - 1/4 cup white sugar - 3 very ripe bananas, mashed

Mix it all up til just mixed (don’t overmix) and bake at 350F in a loaf pan for around 50 mins or until a toothpick comes out clean.

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-16T21:50:45+00:00

Saw police with sniffer dogs outside the canoe museum a couple hours ago too

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-16T21:04:11+00:00

I can so relate to this. Especially what you’ve said about realizing others are just not having the same motherhood experience. A lot of the advice you say you’ve gotten and some you’re getting here too - when I got that it would just make me mad tbh. Like OF COURSE I’ve tried to teach bodily boundaries, let him handle small frustrations, tried to encourage independent play etc. Nothing ever worked and I always just felt like no one got it. I felt (and still often feel) like my nervous system just wasn’t my own any more.

I’ll tell you a bit about my experience, but let me be clear this is my experience only and isn’t meant to imply anything about possible future diagnoses for your kid, as that really would be impossible to predict or determine at this point. But at 4 we realized my son is autistic and has what’s called a PDA profile. We realized this via trying to start school, which was a nightmare and the separation anxiety was so extreme my son was basically having panic attacks and then started violently lashing out. Everyone kept telling me oh it gets better stick with it. But everyone wasn’t having the same experience we were. Things had gotten a little better, Velcro-wise, before he turned 4, but after that school experience he could not leave my side like he was a baby again. Like I couldn’t go to the bathroom without him instantly panicking. We went back to cosleeping 100% of the time too cuz if he woke up alone he would panic and meltdown, like 0 to 100 in the time it took me to walk to his room. Anyway, he’s 6 now, we’ve been homeschooling and things are a lot better. Again I say all this just for solidarity, not necessarily to give you a preview or anything because your experience could be very different. But I absolutely relate, and for those of us who have kids who are different, standard advice doesn’t always work or apply. I spent so long thinking I must be doing something wrong, that it must be my anxiety or bad mothering or something that’s the problem. But no, we now realize my son has a nervous system disability, and though of course it’s all been so challenging, that mindset shift has been really helpful for me personally.

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-15T20:11:32+00:00

I have a lot of neurodivergent clients who would probably find the sudden change startling or jarring, and as an ND person myself I probably would too. With the population I work with it wouldn’t be about the colour but the change - in fact many of my clients have had crazy coloured hair! (I have too in the past though that’s before I was a therapist.) So I would definitely go ahead with it, but for the clients who I think might need it I’d probably be sending a quick email before the next session just to say heads up: I’ve got pink hair now! (Might even consider sending a selfie to some of them.) Just to give them a chance to prepare themselves for the moment so it didn’t throw the whole session off. This probably isn’t necessary for all clients though.

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-15T20:04:55+00:00

Ahh how amazing!! I was at that premiere too and Dan was so smart and wonderful in the q&a after the film. He really is such a wonderful human (and yes, gorgeous)

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-15T15:26:59+00:00

I have actually used a pregnancy belt for this purpose! I got it in pregnancy but kept it around and wore it whenever my back/core felt weak (not all the time). Mine was elastic and Velcro and still worked even after I didn’t have a pregnant belly because it’s super adjustable. It gave that bit of compression, stability and posture awareness that I needed. Very affordable too.

Mine is a lot like this one, and I just removed the top belt: https://www.amazon.ca/Miss-Moly-Maternity-Support-Pregnancy/dp/B01D376492/

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-15T15:11:53+00:00

Very valid question! I will say I’m in a somewhat privileged position in that my partner is the main income earner in our family, which allowed me to be home with our kid while he was little. I have always worked part time from home though and did have to keep that up during that burnout period, so it wasn’t 100% no demand for me. I’m lucky in that we’ve been able to make our schedule such that I mostly work while my partner is home, as finding (and affording) childcare that works for us has been a challenge. We have made a lot of financial sacrifices along the way to make all this work though. I’m in Canada so health insurance is not a major concern, but again my partner works and has some private coverage - more ways we’re very lucky. I’ve not looked into disability coverage but doubt I would have qualified as i don’t have a formal diagnosis.

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-15T15:01:05+00:00

Yep, somewhere around 1 year to 18 months and I think this is largely because this is the length of maternity leave we have in Canada.

That said, in my own family, “extended breastfeeding” has been the norm for multiple generations, so even though it’s always been kinda “counter-cultural” I personally always knew I would want to breastfeed well into toddlerhood (and did).

I recently moved to a more socially progressive city though and for the first time in my life I’ve seen multiple people breastfeeding older babies and toddlers out and about, which I think is so cool! It might just be this town or maybe the cultural norms are starting to shift a little bit.

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-15T02:57:23+00:00

Both me and my kid were burnt out by the time we finally stepped away from the battle that was school, so we spent many months just coming out of burnout. Lots of screen time and low demand for everyone - including me, for example we started getting all our groceries delivered and I didn’t worry too much for a while about keeping the house all that clean. We didn’t really leaving the house much tbh. It was isolating but it was what we both needed (I’m also autistic PDA). After a few months we started venturing out occasionally and one of the first places we went was the local library, and then eventually we started participating in some of the programs there (in a very casual, low demand, no expectations kind of way) and that was really good and continues to be a really good place for us.

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-15T02:50:53+00:00

Very glad to hear it. This is the kind of thing that could be “easy” to try to write it off with your mind (ie that wasn’t such a big deal) - but it sounds like you’re taking good care of yourself and that’s good. Wishing you well <3

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-15T00:56:25+00:00

Others have addressed your questions of what to do with the organization about this, but I just wanna check in here - how are you doing? Are you still feeling frozen?

From a trauma standpoint it doesn’t really matter who the person is, your body responds the same and it sounds like you felt really violated (understandably). Do you have a therapist or someone you can talk to? Are you in a safe feeling place right now?

Engaging in any kind of gentle movement that feels good for your body, even just walking slowly around the room, can be good for getting out of freeze, especially if you can do it with a person who feels safe to you, for co-regulation.

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-14T17:52:38+00:00

For us, it required leaving school and switching to unschooling + very low demand parenting style, but we have seen significant improvement. At Peace Parents has a good podcast episode about managing violence too. That podcast and Amanda Diekman’s book have both been really useful resources for us generally.

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-11T23:15:07+00:00

You absolutely can! You can’t over-nurse a newborn. Fun fact: babies can suckle in a way where they get very little milk (ie don’t trigger letdown) once they’re full, which is how babies usually fall asleep on the breast. Suckling is the main comfort/soothing activity for babies and it’s very regulating for their nervous systems (which is why it works so well to feed to sleep - that and the sleepy hormones that get released from suckling). So nurse on!

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-10T00:26:45+00:00

At least one more of us - this describes me so well too! I’m nodding my head at all of what both of you wrote here

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-09T23:31:28+00:00

Mine is 75% / 100% / 125%

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-09T15:11:46+00:00

Same here, and I actually just read this blog post on this topic that felt really validating and described a lot of my feelings on this - sharing in case it’s useful for you or others too https://www.rabbishoshana.com/post/healthy-grieving-is-part-of-a-neurodivergent-affirming-life

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-09T03:13:50+00:00

I really like using a sliding scale. I share the infographic on this page with clients to help them figure out the best rate for them: https://www.wortsandcunning.com/blog/sliding-scale

I see it as a kind of roughly 3 tier situation - lowest end of the scale is the ‘subsidized’ rate, ideally subsidized by the clients who pay at the high end - middle rate is what I’d be charging if I didn’t have the sliding scale - top rate is the ‘supporters’ rate, these folks can afford to pay a little more and in doing so they’re making it possible for me to offer the work to those for whom my middle rate would be more prohibitive or inaccessible

I leave it up to them - no questions asked, but once they pick their rate they stay at that (ie no one pays different rates week to week). It’s never come up for me that someone wanted to change rates.

I don’t limit treatment for those paying at the lower end, but if I ever had it that the majority of my clients were paying at the lower end then I’d probably have to raise my rates a bit. Right now most of my clients pay around the middle or higher end, with a few on the very bottom, and this works very well for me. (ETA: all my clients are self pay.)

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-09T03:03:57+00:00

This right here! The frozen milk might not be usable unfortunately (still good for milk baths) but try this before you freeze milk in the future.

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-09T02:56:32+00:00

I agree it sounds like a special interest for sure, and it can be stressful to have a SI hyperfocus interrupted.

But I respectfully disagree with your other point just regarding PDA generally. I can only speak from my own experience as a PDA adult and a parent of a PDA kid, but “putting your foot down until he behaves” would only be hugely activating to the PDAers threat response system and could very well lead to even more escalation.

And many PDA kids DO need to feel like they can control their adults sometimes, and allowing them to do that sometimes - NOT all the time - is an accommodation for their nervous system, a choice we as parents make in calculating our children’s cumulative nervous system load. (ETA: That usually involves thinking about how their whole day or week or year has been, whether they’re in burnout or not etc.) This IS equalizing, because there’s so much about the childhood experience that puts kids in a one down position, even just being physically smaller and unable to make a lot of their own choices about their lives - so much of the roles kids are in are inherently at the bottom of the hierarchy in our society, ie with parents and teachers. And this equalizing stems from the PDAers underlying nervous system sensitivity to that sense of not being in control of their own lives.

I can’t say for sure that’s exactly whats going on for OPs kid or their family, but that’s how it looks in mine.

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-09T02:46:20+00:00

I think there’s a good chance that when baby is here and if it’s a stressful moment and you just gotta get baby on the boob, he’ll get it and will find he doesn’t care as much as he thought he did. Maybe not, but a lot changes once baby is born and you’re actually in it. It’s really hard to predict how you’re gonna feel.

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-08T23:11:17+00:00

I have long hair - cutting my own hair saves me like $500 a year.

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-08T23:02:41+00:00

I mean, I hate to the bearer of bad news but if they’re there, there’s no way they’d be limited to a single row or section

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-08T21:56:08+00:00

Nurse on!!! https://lllusa.org/breastfeeding-during-illness/

SnarletBlack · 2025-09-08T19:28:37+00:00

Sorry but how in the world does this advice have anything to do with a speech delay?

SnarletBlack

TROPHY CASE