ADHD and the FierceFamily

It’s been weeks since our last posting.  Did you see how Jamama posted like crazy for a while and then just sort of dropped off?  It’s not that she lost interest, or forgot about the blog…neither did I.  It’s just that life - or lifestyle - is notoriously unsympathetic toward those with ADHD.  At least our life.  And our lifestyle.

You see, routine is key for survival when you live with ADHD.  Summer is bad for routine.  The kids have been doing something totally different every single week since school let out.  They’ve been on four week-long trips with grandparents, four weeks of swim team (and all the associated madness), had two weeks of babysitters, playdates, sleepovers, and birthday parties, and are now split between skateboard camp (him) and a week home (her).  Next week they’re both at camp, then he’s home for a week while she does a second week of camp.  After that we’re all off for a week of “vacation,” then it’s back to school.

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I know Jamama thinks she’s the only one for whom the perfect calendar is some sort of holy grail.  Not so!  I too am constantly looking for a calendar that will seamlessly address the following needs:

1. Free (or incredibly cheap)
2. Supports multiple calendars (Tim, Family, Work, etc.)
3. Calendar stored locally
4. Syncs with Windows Mobile Handheld
5. Syncs with Google Calendar
6. Supports category synchronization between local, Google, and Handheld

The closest I’ve managed to come is Sunbird - from Mozilla the makers of the Firefox browser and the Thunderbird email client.  It’s what I’m using right now, but it fails on two items in the list above.

1. While it is able to sync with both my handheld and Google calendar (using third party plugins) it erases my categories.
2. The calendar is not actually stored locally.

GCalDaemon is the application that allows me to set the location of my .ics file (open source calendar file) to point at my Google calendar.  The drawback is that there is no local calendar and if the GCalDaemon is not running, or I have no internet connection, my calendar will be empty.  The other plugin I use is called BirdieSync, which allows Sunbird to sinc with a variety of handheld devices.  It works great but costs $20.

At work I use Microsoft Outlook because that’s just the way it is.  While I am really quite pleased with the newest version (2007), it won’t sync with my Google calendar.  Plus, it is neither free nor cheap.  Thats said, there is a fairly decent way to sync Outlook with a Google calendar.

The search continues.  Anyone out there have any great ideas?

As a kid, I always knew I was different - in a bad way - from my peers. Though adults seemed to group me in with the smarter kids, I was not like them. I never did my homework, except in the 5 minutes before class in the hallway. I always meant to stay on top of things, and developed really elaborate systems for doing so. Then, a week, or a few days, or a few hours into the new system, I’d fall on my face. Woe to me when a teacher had a flexible deadline, because I never, ever did an assignment before the very last minute it was due. If the deadline wasn’t clear, that last-minute adrenaline never kicked in, and I never did the assignment. Continue Reading »