Park Play

We are fortunate enough to live next to a great park and on top of that, we happen to have a youth drop in program at our park during the summer.
Monday to Friday in the afternoon children of all ages from our community can stop by the "Green Shack" at the park to play.

Our green shack literally is a green shack next to the playground. The program is run by the city and has a youth leader there that gets the community children together playing games, building sand castles, having water fights and doing crafts. It is a really great program and most of the kids in our community look forward to it every year.
This year we are letting Krazy Caity go to the green shack program all by herself as part of her earning trust and learning to be responsible. I gave the program leader my phone number and explained Krazy Caitys disorders to him as a precaution before I let Caity go. So far things are going extremely well!

Getting along with other children and participating in group activities is not so easy for kids with ADHD so I have been expecting the worst. Fortunately things have been going much better than expected so far. Caity is participating in most of the activities and has been learning to remove herself from the group when she starts to feel overwhelmed. All in all great news, zero issues and lots of learning has been happening. Things were going great right up until yesterday... The day the community kids got to pain the Green Shack. The rules are simple, pain the shack and not each other. It seems as though some of the kids in the community, including our dear Krazy Caity, decided that painting Caity was more entertaining.

The aftermath of this event was something none of us will soon forget. 
The first thing we did upon seeing Krazy Caity was ask her why she let the other kids paint her. Then I took her straight to the shower, which was fine until we had to wash the sand and paint off of her face. It took well over ten minutes of spraying, washing, wiping and crying to get the paint off.

Krazy Caity explained to me that she didn't just come home on her own, she was sent home by the youth leader. It turns out that while she thought it was funny to begin with, after a while being painted by other children wasn't so fun. When Caity asked the kids to stop painting her they didn't listen and started painting her clothes as well.

As with most ADHD kids, becoming overwhelmed with a situation doesn't take much and Krazy Caity is no different. Things at the park went from fun to overwhelming to scary for Caity really fast. While being sent home is never fun for kids, it really was best for Caity and she was thankful to have the leader take charge and remove her from the situation.
When she got home her senses and emotions were overloaded. It took a long time to get her calm enough to explain what happened but once she started explaining the situation she realized that she could have avoided becoming overwhelmed. 
After a long discussion she explained that the reason she didn't remove herself was because she let herself become overwhelmed and felt out of control. She did point out how she can avoid those feelings and gave great examples of what she should have done.
This gives me hope that in the future, Krazy Caity will be able to recognize when she is becoming overwhelmed and will hopefully be able  to deal with these feelings. For now we are working on recognizing feelings and letting Caity explain to us how she feels and what she can do about it. One day at a time.