she's more the grazer - at meal time, she'll stop eating when she's not hungry any more (and then, naturally, is diving into the fridge half an hour later). can't get her to eat more at once no matter how delicious the meal. she also has a habit of drinking two big glasses of water with her meal so she's filled herself up. we've put a stop to that: she can have one ounce with her dinner but no more until she's finished off more food. it's helped a bit but not a lot.
the movement, that's a lifelong thing: she was 9mo old when the healthy babies worker said she'd been in the business nearly 20 years and never saw a baby move as much as saari. she was already walking and she would move in a continuous cycle: bounce her head off the couch, go hands-and-feet on the floor, roll herself into a sitting position, then get up and do it all over again. she did that the entire hour the the worker was there. she's in continuous movement unless she's watching TV and then her face goes blank and her body freezes. if she gets bored, it becomes bad. it's better now but when she was 3yrs old and we had to go to the doctor's office, she *had to* run up and down the hall continuously - she would run the length of the hall, *slam* the far wall, say "tag! you're it!" and then run all the way back to "BANG" on the waiting room door. the family doctor begged me to put her on rispardal after watching her do this for ten minutes straight. she was 4 when she was diagnosed by a developmental specialist with ADHD and impulse disorder. her ADHD, at that time, was ranked about a 7-1/2 out of 10 and the only reason it wasn't higher was bec she isn't aggressive (in spite of her screaming at the top of her lungs as she went up and down the hall of the clinic slamming every door that wasn't locked; that was stopped by the secretary tossing some highlighter markers and a steno pad on the floor for her to find and instantly she switched off). that doctor, too, wanted to put her medication (adderall). the paediatric specialist we have now believes as i do that medication should not be a first resort until we've done what we can to teach her coping skills and techniques. that's why we got the indoor mini-tramp: when she gets "itchy skin" (she calls it) she can jump on the trampoline and it makes the itchies fall off.
normally, it's not too bad to get her off the ice or out of the playground - i call out a countdown: "15 minutes.... 10 minutes... 7 minutes.... 4 minutes... saari, you've got two minutes left, make the most of them" and so on. i don't know why it was different today.