Hello, I'm Amanda. So I'm in my pantry because this is kind of where it began. This is my hideout where I come to hide from my family, from the Chaos. I would come here to cry about what a failure I was. In the pantry is where I actually contemplated ending my life because my husband deserved a better wife and my kids a better mom. I'm so glad that I'm here today.

So I received an email from a homeschool blogger and there was a link in there to Calm the Chaos free workshop. I only got in on it on the last two days and in those two days, there was so much that gave me hope and value.

So the biggest reason I was in here sobbing, well there's so many, but the biggest was a horrible, Mom. I was not nice. I was screaming. I had a hair trigger - my son with SPD. He really had a hard time self-regulating and I was getting beat up pretty much every day. My other two other kiddos were also getting beaten up weekly. The siblings couldn't seem to get along. They were just always bickering, always fighting. There was always something.

So getting involved in CTC has given me the tools to help. Just three items alone are gold. There's so much more, but I’ll just hit on these three. Firstly, I was taught how to learn what my triggers are and how to regulate them, how to figure out how to stop them. Then being taught to huddle, which is basically a family meeting where everyone is respected, valued, and heard. We were able to come up with a family plan. So when I wasn't able to help my son regulate before we were past the point of no return, we had a plan that would keep my other two kids safe, and which allowed me to just focus on him, make sure he's safe and our home was not completely destroyed. The third was for siblings to get along, through learning the frameworks and having another family huddle. It's really all about communicating with your whole family and having huddles. It's amazing that we were able to come up with a plan together as a family on how we can communicate our needs and how to connect with each other. So if one member of the family is upset with another member, we actually have a sheet in our hallway that we can go to. It's visual. So we can say, if I'm upset with him, this is what he likes doing. This is what I like to do. Let's go do this together for 10 minutes. And usually they play it a lot longer than 10 minutes because they've forgotten or they've already apologized. It is amazing. Just those three things. There's so much hope in that. I didn't know this was possible last year. So cannot be thankful enough for Dayna and her team.