Chuck:                       Ok, like he said, I am Chuck Hires and this is my wife Shirley is also on the phone.  I’m going to say something to my wife, if I start to go off on a little tangent because I’m very excited right now.  I’m probably the happiest dad in the United States or in the world right now.  I tend to get overly excited so if I start to, honey, just say my name and I’ll get back on track. 

                                    With that being said, our son Charlie, who is twelve right now, I will start with how he was before the medication.  He is a wonderful little kid.  He was very liked and has tons of friends.  As with all ADD kids, we were constantly having to be right behind him and right on top of him.  We’d tell him something and two minutes later he would forget it.  His grades at school, he’d either make a 100 or a zero.  It wasn’t because he didn’t know how to do it.  As with most ADD kids, if you do have an ADD kid if you’re on the phone you must, most ADD kids or the ones without the learning disabilities are usually very smart.  They test very high on their IQ’s.  Not as high as they can, but there are portions of that test they just can’t stay focused on unless they are on something. 

                                    Anyway, he would do his homework and then it would sit in his backpack and he’d never turn it in so he would get a zero.  He would have papers that would come home about pictures of something.  It got to the point where I had to check his backpack every day because he would just forget to turn it in.  In the fourth grade, his grades started to drop even if we were on him every single day.  His teachers suggested that maybe we should have him checked for ADD.  We did. We went to have him tested and of course they told us he did have ADD and they put him on a medication. 

                                    They had mentioned Ritalin and all my life I had heard nothing but bad things about Ritalin.  I didn’t want to go with that one.  They said there were alternatives and we started out with Consortia.  We were on that for the first year and of course immediately it did help with his focus with his grades, but all of a sudden he didn’t care about anything.  He didn’t care about friends or playing or about his sports.  He did travel baseball and he runs cross country.  He’s a very good runner.  He used to love sports and he just stopped caring about everything. 

                                    We got tired of that one and asked the doctor if there was another one that could just have his personality come out a little bit because he was suffering so much.  He lost his friends.  He lost his will to do anything.  We were still having to stay on top of him to do his homework and get it turned in just simply for the fact that nothing seemed to matter to him.  They switched him to Aderol. 

                                    The Aderol wasn’t really any better.  As a matter of fact, as he was getting older things were getting worse.  It really got to a peak this past Christmas.  We went to Hawaii for our family vacation.  It was our first time in Hawaii and his first time in Hawaii.  We’d go surfing and we’d go diving.  We saw sharks under water and saw whales on top of the water.  We were hiking and seeing these beautiful waterfalls.  Everyday, we would ask Charlie, “What did you think about today, what was your thing?”  “Everything.”  “What about the surfing, you say you love the surfing?”  “It was good.”  That’s all we could get and it was breaking our hearts. 

                                    We decided to take him off of the medication like I’m sure everybody does.  Every three or four months you just get in denial and you want to take him off of it.  Well, we were in Hawaii and we take him off of it.  This is a controlled substance so I’m going to use another one.  It was like he was on crack.  He was eating like you want every kid to eat.  Before the other medication he had almost zero body fat.  He was 82 pounds and five feet tall.  He’s a skinny little thing.  He’s eating and his little mind couldn’t stop.  He was all over the place and it had actually gotten worse because he was on the medication and now we took him off. 

                                    My wife’s best friend is a nurse and she said, “You can’t take him off of that.  You’ve got to leave him on it.”  Of course, when we got back from vacation we went back on it for the second semester.  His grades were good.  He’s a straight A student, but that is because we are on him every single day.  It’s almost impossible over the last few years to have fun with him, because you have to stay on him so much just for him to perform.  It’s not their fault, but you still have to do it because it’s part of being a parent.  It was just killing us, to be honest.  It was driving me nuts because I love doing everything with him.  I volunteer at the school.  I coach.  I’m involved with everything with him.  His grades are good and he has the potential to be a really good athlete. 

                                    Because of the ADD, I was talking about the travel baseball.  On weekends is when we play our games.  Saturday, we go out there and you would think this kid looks like he could go all the way and play in the majors.  He just could hit everything and throw everything and field everything.  On Sunday, you’d come out and you’d swear that he was auditioning for a new Bad News Bears movie because he couldn’t even throw the ball to the pitcher.  His swing looked like he hadn’t ever swung the bat before.  It was just night and day.  Of course, that frustrated coaches and it frustrated other players because one day they can count on him and the next day they couldn’t. 

I never told anybody that he had ADD.  We just never told anybody.  We didn’t want him to get ridiculed or put under or made fun of and we always kept it a secret.  That was another thing that really hurt us.  I’m probably getting a little excited there and I’m sorry.  I’m going to push forward.  This past summer, Charlie got an invitation to go to a college preparatory school in athletics.  They focus on athletics and academics.  His test scores from his FCATS.  He scored in the top two percent in the state in both English and Mathematics.  I’m guessing the schools check those things and they send out invitations to people because that is what we got.

We got this and we talked to Charlie about it.  We told him it was a boarding school and we can go check it out if you want.  He was like, “Sure.”  That was his only word, sure.  We drove down to the school and asked and took a tour of the school.  Charlie, of course, was on his medication.  We were asking him if he was going to like it and his reaction.  We get back in the car to head back home and we asked him what he thinks about the school.  He goes, “Um, I’ll try it.”  Just like I’ll try it and that was it.  We weren’t sure how he was feeling about it. 

We got back and we were fighting, not fighting, but going back and forth on do we want to go.  There was no way we could let our son go away from us.  I mean, this can’t happen.  Finally, we came up with that we have been wanting for a long time to come up with an alternative to this medication and there is no way I’m going to send my kid away on medication and a controlled substance and that kind of thing. 

We were doing research and I didn’t go to work or anything for about four days.  As a matter of fact, it was almost completely four days.  From the time I got up to the time I went to bed I was searching on the internet.  I found stuff like BeCalmed, Focus, acupuncture, herbs, and all kinds of things.  Finally, I came across Jon Bennett’s book.  His book just opened my eyes to a lot of things that I never even understood.  I never even knew about ADD. 

I wish he was still on the phone because I wanted to thank him for writing that because he has changed our life unbelievably.  I mean, we are just ecstatically happy, like I haven’t been in years.  He gave us Norris’s number and we called Norris.  One of our decisions was that if it’s a one hundred percent money back guarantee, how can we say no to this?  That’s why we are picking it.  To be honest, that is why we picked it plus we liked the book, of course.