You might have already heard that the CBS Fall line-up will include a sitcom entitled $#*! My Dad Says that originated from a Twitter account of the same name (without the symbols). A man who moved back in with his adult parents started tweeting bizarre things his dad said, built a huge following, which led to a TV series starring William Shatner launching this Fall.

I think we parents of children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) need to do the same thing, only we can entitled our Twitter account $#*! My ADHD Child Does. I know I would subscribe!

Think about it:

• I had to explain to my child … AGAIN … why he may not sled off the roof.
• Jimmy only shimmied up the basketball goal three times during the game today.
• Sam yelled out “Boring!” in the middle of the pastoral prayer at church today.

Yes, all three of these could be tweets about my adopted child with ADHD. In fact, I think my life could make a great sitcom. Imagine this …

My adopted child has recently developed a fascination with matches and lighters. He has been to numerous fire safety programs since he was little, and our family has had a fire plan in place for years. Despite all of my efforts, my adopted child has absolutely no regard for the dangers of fire. Couple that with his impulse control issues due to his attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and we have a real problem.

Of course, I don’t have matches and lighters just lying around my house. Nevertheless, there is nowhere in my house I have been able to store them (on high shelves that even I cannot reach easily) without my adopted child figuring out a way to access them. After this last incident of getting into my supposedly child-proof lighter (there is no such thing with my kid) in my bedroom (where he wasn’t even supposed to be), I have decided to buy a lockbox with a combination lock (no key that he can steal) to store all lighters and matches.

I went online to find advice for how to stop my adopted child from playing with matches and was shocked to find very little helpful information. Reasoning with my child is not going to work (he also has learning disabilities), and clearly no other consequences I have imposed are working, either. I am not going to remove all lighters from my house because I use them to light scented candles in my bedroom while I unwind at the end of the day. I suffer from insomnia, and the scented candles help with this.

Many of the sites try to make the parents feel guilty for not supervising the child closely enough. In this last incident, I was on my computer in my office while my son was playing quietly in his bedroom only 20 feet away with the door closed. I cannot handcuff the child to me until he turns 18 years old!

So, I called the fire department to seek some advice. Here is what the fire captain told me:

Do you remember in the 1980’s and 1990’s when everyone was freaking out about “crack babies”? I sure do, and I marked “will not consider” next to “prenatal drug abuse” on our adoption application. I might have considered prenatal marijuana drug use, but there was no way in Hades that I was adopting a “crack baby.” The predictions for these babies were dire.

Guess what? Society was (thankfully) wrong. MSNBC recently ran an article entitled ‘Crack babies’ defy mother’s curse that follows up on some of these “crack babies,” who are now young adults. Are they all perfect? No. However, as a group, these “crack babies” are functional adults who have not increased the crime rates throughout the United States as predicted.

According to the article, the most common aftereffect seems to be attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which has also been linked to prenatal smoking. So, checking the “will not consider” box on my adoption application did not prevent me from dealing with the same issues. (My adopted child’s birth mother smoked throughout her pregnancy.)

I need to vent about my adopted child’s attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) medication, and this is a place I can do it, so here goes… We have been using stimulant medication to manage his ADHD for over two years. While the stimulant medication (Daytrana and then Focalin) have been great in the classroom, they have caused a number of side effects, including lack of appetite and insomnia. Let me tell you – it is hard watching your stocky child get skinny, and it is even harder living with a child who goes to bed as late as or later than you do.

We have a new ADHD doctor who suggested that we try Strattera, which is a non-stimulant medication for ADHD. The issue is that you cannot tell immediately whether it is going to work because it takes six weeks to build up in the body. I was feeling hopeful as I did not use the Focalin on the weekends, and I could see changes.

Yesterday was the six-week mark, and I sent my adopted child to school on only the Strattera. It was a big fat disaster, and I spent about an hour yesterday crying tears of frustration.