Tidbits

I miss writing.  I am not sure how on earth I can fit it in.  Days blur by.  We homeschool.  We cook and clean.  We tend Grandpa.  We deal with the forest and it's surprises.  I try "to Art" (as my secret brain calls it), but am usually too tired.  So, blog-schmog.

But there are a few things happening that should really be recorded.

Jonah has begun reading.  Really, really reading.  Last year at this time he was agonizing through, "Pat can tap the map.  Tap, Pat, tap!"  One year later, and he is reading a 5th grade chapter book called  Because of Winn-Dixie (which he prounounces WINN-dixie, like Windex).  It is still a struggle.  He still gets stuck on words with b's and d's (bdbdbdbdbdb...wouldn't you?), and we bumble along together slowly, but HE chose the book, and he chooses it again and again every day at reading time.  And he choses every day to try, very, very hard.  I am in awe of him.  And because he loves being read to, he pays me for “extra chapters” in the books I read aloud to him, by reading TO ME for five extra minutes per mom-read chapter.  Deliciously, the author we are currently reading is the master of chapter cliff hangers, always leaving him wanting.

Tessa has begun high school.  It has been a brutal transition.  Tessa was a "casual" student in middle school, not worried or terribly serious.  Very chill.  But she is our first child to hold any interest in College, with its high degree of scholarly expectation.  Her online high school is full of teachers to hold her accountable that don't share her DNA.  She is newly motivated to succeed, and has already been heard to say, "But I'm ALMOST down to a B!!!"  It's uncharted territory for me as a parent.

Ellie is transitioning.  Adulthood is around the very near corner, and she is making plans.  She talks about moving out, and job plans.  She got her covid-belated driver's license today. She suddenly cares about school.  I hear the rustling from within her cocoon.

Adam is thriving in Utah.  He is learning to balance life.  Adam never learned to "hang out with friends" until the last two months of his senior year.  While the sudden joy of that discovery was really a relief to me (isolated and introverted teenagers worry mamas), there was a learning curve that took it's toll on his savings.  He has struck a lovely balance now between work and play, and is expanding his social circle, which was tiny for too long.  He has found a real  love-of-learning about all things Viking, which has expanded to history, archeology, ancient languages and even his own genealogy.  It's a glorious thing to watch, and I have been learning along side him so that I can understand all that he is absorbing.  This week I found myself touring an online Norwegian Viking museum, and attempting tablet weaving.  I failed, but I will keep trying.  I have a goal to make Adam a gift for Christmas; a woven Viking belt, a replica of the one found on the Oseberg Burial Ship.  Yep, I'm geeking out.

Ethan's not very vocal about his world, but work seems good, and he is coping well with lame car disappointments.  Between work and his own personal study, he has piled more skills onto his already broad knowledge of all things mechanical and electrical.  I'm so proud of him.

The sea-sickness Guy was suffering from the wildly rolling waves of his new principal job seems to be subsiding.  He is learning which wheels are truly in need of aid, and which will continue to squeak unappreciative to any amount of oil given.  We are finding a rhythm, which includes some later nights, and my learning an all-new jargon.  There should be an "Orientation for Spouses of New Admins", including a dictionary, program flow charts, and a little training on grief counseling.  The first two months were very hard.  Hard, plus covid.  Everybody is mad at school administrators, as though they knew this was coming and hadn't bothered to plan for it.  "Fair" has lost all meaning in a world where there simply are not answers, where need and demand outnumber available manhours threefold, and where people are screaming to get their never-again "normal" back, and they are screaming it at YOU.  Try stepping into that chaos on your first day.  Hard.  Really hard.

One more thing... I found a new doctor.  It's just the very beginning of what will likely become a long and difficult process.  But I am hopeful that by this time next year, I will show as much improvement in my health as Jonah has in his reading. 

Oh!  And Natalie lost her first two teeth, and one more is starting the dangle-dance.  There is a comfortable, if not slightly sad, predictability in that little detail.  I don't know what the future holds, but I do know that tooth isn't going to be there come Thanksgiving.  

Thank You, Calvin

“He’s probably the worst case I’ve seen in 20 years.”

That’s what his reading specialist said. Nine year old Jonah has extremely profound dyslexia.  He sees everything, wood grain, water stains, even burned toast, in 3-D pictures. That includes letters. They levitate and spin on the page. Words create patterns and pictures before his eyes. The word “bed” actually looks like a bed to him (do you see it? The headboard and the footboard sticking up?).  In his brain, it’s like the letters are cut out of thick pieces of wood, rotating in front of him, revealing their sides and back, upside down, sideways, and diagonally. He doesn’t have the luxury of print that stays in one place.

It would be pretty hard for you and I to read if we had to chase the words around in the air above the page, don’t you think?

A few years ago, I was struck with a sudden awareness that the reason I had been prompted, before Jonah was even crawling, to homeschool our kids was  for this little boy.  The feeling was powerful, an instant paradigm shift. In one moment, I became suddenly aware that this child, with his very unique temperament and astounding creativity, would have been destroyed in an environment of arbitrary assignments and communal expectations made with no regard to his interests and talents.  And this came before we even knew he had a learning challenge, which is part of the blessing. Whenever I doubt myself as a homeschool mom, I have that moment to look back on. 

In the process of learning how to teach Jonah, I’ve been learning so much about dyslexia. I’ve even learned that besides Ellie, who we already knew had it, that Ethan and I both have it too. Mine is a story for another post, and I only wish I had known about Ethan’s back when he was in school.

The other kids might have done well enough in public school. Tessa grows beautifully wherever she is planted, and Ellie’s sweetness gets her through a lot of tough situations.  Nano is a spaz, but super smart and quick to learn. She’d do well, as long as the teacher didn’t mind having a singing grasshopper in class. 

But sweet Jonah is a different story. He is perhaps my most sensitive child. If he is feeling shame or embarrassment for any reason, the whole factory shuts down, rendering him unable to function. Rage can loom just beneath the surface, and it doesn’t take much for it to break through.  He has a tender soul, which can attract bullies. Being given multiple of directions confuses him, and he doesn’t do well with several adults to focus on. 

Learning how to be the best mom for Jonah has been an exercise in balancing my own emotions. He’s a barometer, and feels everything around him. He’s an investigator of facial expressions and body language, and studies people’s emotional state (dyslexics are masters of pattern recognition), reacting strongly to any negativity. If my voice elevates, if my expression shows even slight distain for his behavior, he crumbles.  I have become an expert poker player, learning to read his tells -which are very subtle- and reshuffling the cards before he shuts down.  

On top of it all, Jonah has a profound creativity. I have never seen a child so artistically inclined. His artwork is amazing, his engineering clever and sophisticated, and his problem-solving, eloquent.  He is a brilliant collector of knowledge about all wildlife and nature.  He studies biology for hours on end.  There’s just one problem…

His brain was not built to read. You have never seen a child work so hard to achieve so little on a daily basis. I have held him in my arms as he wept in frustration, learning the same letter or the same tiny word over and over again, only to forget it again the next day. And the next. And the next.

I started with the usual things that had worked with my other kids, moved on to the brain training that Ellie had found success with, and then found a kind woman, that reading specialist, at church who worked with him for a year out of the goodness of her heart. He progressed some, but true reading was still an elusive goal.  We got additional resources from the charter school, and have worked with several different reading programs, each offering its own tools and helps along the way.  We are finally seeing progress, albeit very slow. 

One of the hardest things about having a child with dyslexia is that their reading abilities are far below their intellectual ones. Books that are easy enough for them to read are “baby books” in their eyes.

All but one. Well, one collection, I should say. Calvin and Hobbes.

Thank heaven above for Bill Watterson, the cartoon creator, over whom I have literally prayed with gratitude.  Somehow he took a little boy who is smart and funny and wild and who struggles, and wrangled him into the pages of those blessed books.  He gave that boy a companion; a conscience, who is wise and noble, and a little bit naughty, with a sophisticated sense of humor. They are everything Jonah needs right now.  

Jonah and I read Calvin and Hobbes every day, jumping from strip to strip based on how Jonah feels in the moment, which you can do, because every strip is it’s own tiny story. The font is easy for him to read, and having it all in capital letters somehow helps him. We even find ourselves talking about things like science and politics as I explain why a certain strip that he’s not understanding was funny. Calvin is a pretty awesome little boy.

In the past few weeks, Jonah has finally begun to blossom. He’s reading words like, people and snowball and feathers, which is huge considering a few months ago he still couldn’t consistently read him or and.  He calls the word the, “that stupid little word”. 

He’s come such a long, hard way. 

Jonah has recognized that if spaceman spiff is in the pictures, he probably won’t be able to read those frames. Words like despicable, adversary, and mertilizer-laser are a little complex still. 

But I’m not worried anymore. When he’s ready, I know Calvin will be waiting for us.

(If you are worried about the bean bag being too close to the stove, don’t be. It’s an optical illusion. It was two feet away.)   

Resources we have used:

Other Traits of dyslexia:

https://www.dyslexia.com/about-dyslexia/signs-of-dyslexia/test-for-dyslexia-37-signs/

Book: The Gift of Dyslexia by Ronald Davis

Linda Mood Bell reading program

Brain Training by Diane Kraft 

All About Reading program by Marie Rippel

And of course, Calvin and Hobbes, by the wonderful Bill Watterson. 

Pickle Girl

I am so far behind.  

I missed three birthdays in our family, and several other important events, like ground hog day (hey, it's an important day.  The whole meteorology world holds it's breath till they know what a large rodent thinks).

Guy's birthday was at the end of March, but he just went from old to older, according to him, so there is mot much new to report there.

But Ellie, on the other hand, hit a big milestone like a Mack truck.  She turned twelve.  I remember twelve.  I think that was the unfortunate year I began wearing a ribbon headband and knickers.  I had a super cool big sister and I wanted to be just like her.  The headband looked way cooler on her.

Ellie loves certain things... and when she loves something she really loves it.  She adores the color green.  She has monkeys everywhere.  She loves pickles.  Her favorite present was the giant jar of pickles we gave her.  When she's older I plan to tell her it was her only gift.

She had a fun birthday party with a monkey theme which she meticulously planned out, including a banana eating contest, swinging from vines, and "grooming", where party goers had to search through the grass, the "big hairy back", for candies (lice, apparently) and eat them.  Don't worry, they had wrappers.  I wouldn't let them eat little chocolate balls right off the grass.  Too risky; dogs, you know.

Coconut Alley... look for the prize!

Some of these girls have been friends since they were babies or toddlers.

Ellie also had her first real-life, paid-in-cash babysitting job.  I am told she did an amazing job and even did the dishes.  My favorite part of her retelling of her adventure was when she wasn't sure if she could leave the 3 year old alone so she could go pee.  She waited till she was dying to go, and in that 30 seconds when she stepped out of the room, the little girl she was watching peed her pants.  I think Ellie will never use the bathroom while on the job again!

We have been learning a lot about Ellie lately.  She's rather a late bloomer academically, and I have been requesting testing through the charter school for a year, but they only have very basic assessments.  I started to pay attention to the nature of the reading mistakes she makes and realized there are a lot of letter and sound reversals (like seeing the word "item" and saying "time"), and I began to suspect dyslexia.  Our Educational Supervisor got us some assessment materials (a program called Brain Integration Therapy by Dianne Craft) and I was able to run and interpret a few tests, learning that Ellie has what is called a blocked Auditory Processing Gate.  Now all those millions of times I have had to give her instructions over and over are beginning to make sense.  Interestingly, this dysfunction occurs often in children who didn't crawl long or at all.  Ellie crawled for two weeks at 8 months old, and then stood up off the middle of the floor and started walking.  The lack of practice her brain experienced working both sides in tandem left her with an underdeveloped ability to use both sides of her brain for the same activity, something very necessary in reading.  

We are beginning the retraining program now, and it will be at least a year of daily exercises.  She may begin to show improvement in about 8 weeks, but it will be a challenge to remember to do it everyday.  We are going to make it be one of her daily tasks, like brushing her teeth.  We'll let you know how it goes.