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I've realized there are a lot of people out there who seem to love our family and love reading my lj but not understand certain things, probably because I haven't explained them well/enough/while they're reading. Usually when this happens my opinion is, "Yeah, it's a blog, how can you assume you have the whole picture?" For whatever reason, though, this is different and makes me want to actually explain some things so people DO get it. In as much as people really can actually get it when they don't even know you.
So.
Ananda is not a brilliant amazing beautiful girl we've robbed of her chances at success by homeschooling her. She is brilliant, and amazing, and beautiful, but she's also complicated, and when I say that it's not me judging her or favoring Aaron - it's my way of shortening some of the following:
She has major social anxiety issues, and has since late infancy. She was a very delayed speaker because she was afraid to perform - when she did start talking, she had what gradually became a severe stutter, that intensified around anyone but us. I freaked about this, I changed pediatricians, I coached my in-laws on how to interact with her, because anytime anybody got impatient or tried to finish her sentences it got drastically worse, and when you could stay totally neutral and pretend it wasn't there, she would "warm up" over the course of a conversation. Thus, speech therapy would have been about the most horrible idea in the world. The ped we switched to was amazed at how well we got her out of stuttering - she continued to do it when she had a developmental leap for awhile, but not in between those leaps.
She was a brilliant artist, incorporating things like long distance perspective and facial expressions into paintings when she was only 2. I used to scan her art in all the time.
Those two things, now, clearly fit into the larger picture of dyslexia, which is not - as many people who are unexposed to it believe - as simple as reversing letters in your mind. It's a whole different way of thinking, her brain works differently. Dyslexic babies can spin objects in their minds to study them from all perspectives. Dyslexic children CAN'T think in words, which is really radical when you study it and consider it - it alters absolutely everything about their experience of daily life vs other kids. Often in good ways, like the artistry and the intuitive understanding of situations - but often in frustrating ways within our society because not thinking in words just does not fit with most traditional schooling methods. It took me a long time to understand that Ananda actually saw letters and numbers (and anything else) moving around on the page. And, of course, whole words and math problems and sentences...
Ananda had amazing visual and listening comprehension and a crazily off the chain attention span from very early, and she was artistic, and she soaked up things like recipes and science and history very easily. I was convinced because of how well she could understand complex things, and her vocabulary, and her exemplary behavior and mature manners, that she was far ahead of the curve when she was 3-5 years old. And she WAS! In those things. But when we started homeschooling she stayed at the same 4 year old level with recognizing and writing letters and numbers, and phonics skills, the whole time she was 5...and 6...and then she turned 7 and still wasn't even beginning to read. As a kid who had poured over book illustrations since infancy and loved to sit at the table and draw it was really counterintuitive to me that she was starting to hate schoolwork. As a well mannered and totally EASY little girl, it was strange to the extreme the way the tears and battles would start over something like, "let's go try to sound out some words". At this point Aaron COULD read, and I was getting kind of freaked out. We were beginning to understand dyslexia after I got a whole thing from PATH about dyslexia, and then talked to our ped about it, and remembered that Bobby (her biological father) is pretty severely dyslexic and it's hereditary.
I believe I helped her conquer her dyslexia and learn to read by systematically applying different approaches with great patience over a period of several months at a time until something worked. I don't believe she would have gotten that sort of treatment in public school. Ultimately, I don't have the foggiest fucking idea how she finally learned to read - she just DID one day. It was like something clicked into place, and bam, she could do it. It was also like a switch was thrown - she started reading, and stopped creating. Before this she was incredible with clay, obsessed with paint, went through crayons like mad...and it switched, no doubt about it. Now, she burns through several chapter books per week at an advanced level but she almost never wants to do any form of art. It still pops out when she's grieving or working through something, but that's kind of it.
I believe the patience, love, and breaks I gave her - along with the consistent chapter per night of reading aloud she's had basically her whole life - while we were working on reading are why she can love it now after such a long struggle, and also why she still feels good about herself and sees herself as a smart kid, even when her little brother was reading first and she would literally sweat and tremble trying to sound words out for years. I have my doubts about whether her self concept and enjoyment of books could have been preserved the same way in a school environment, particularly a school we could afford, in our town.
I have a great book called "The Gift of Dyslexia" that helped me to understand this as not a positive or a negative - but just how she thinks, why she is who she is. I also talked to her about it with an emphasis on the talents and positive quirks and famous dyslexics and read her the book My Name isBrain Brian.
This is one piece of the puzzle I label "complicated".
Then, there is some attachment stuff that is...intense. She lived with Grant as Daddy for months and then it switched very abruptly to Bobby, and then it switched back a year and a half later. My mother lived with us or visited constantly for the first 3 years, and then that stopped abruptly. My sister lived with us for the first year and a half and then Annie saw her twice the following year. I am the constant.
And she has had to deal with me dissapearing into the hospital and coming home incapacitated for weeks five different times during the first 8 years of her life. Most recently, she saw me dying and full of tubes in ICU and walked in on Grant packing my wounds. This was the same year the sister she was so excited about nearly died and we had to tell the kids about her brain and then backtrack and so on.
This shit is partially my fault, partially beyond my control, but all horrible. From the mornings when she wouldn't talk, make eye contact or get out of bed to the clingy and weeping over going to a Girl Scout Camp she loved and enjoyed, EVERY MORNING, and then admitting it was great that afternoon...Annie is different because of this stuff. She spends the night at her friend Christina's and goes over on Saturday afternoons, but Christina's parents needed to have an hour to just talk to me about her after the first time because they were really worried. This is the same for the girl who's house she used to go to all the time when she was younger. It seems like she can go somewhere a time or two or be in a big group like in science classes or at dance or camp or PATH events without attracting attention but anytime adults are around her one on one for awhile - like Grant Sr - I get a lot of "Is she ok?"
When I explained selective mutism to Christina's parents they IMMEDIATELY GOT IT which was a huge relief because I didn't have to explain much more. Their neighbor's boy is apparently the same way and so it clicked right away and they went "oooooh, just like ____, that makes total sense!"
Copy and pasted from Google Health:
Overview
Selective mutism is a condition in which a child who can speak well stops speaking, usually in school or social settings.
Symptoms
•Ability to speak at home with family
•Failure to speak in certain social situations
•Fear of people
•Shyness
Keep in mind this was a professional diagnosis from a licensed therapist, who then worked with her for several months and met with us together to get me to stop being mad at her for a seeming refusal to talk. Which I now feel terrible about. Some more:
Parents often think that the child is refusing to speak, but usually the child is truly unable to speak in certain settings...
This syndrome is not the same as mutism. In selective mutism, the child has the ability to both understand and speak, but fails to speak in certain settings or environments. Children with mutism never speak.
My daughter who just shakes her head and refuses to make eye contact when her friends call on the phone. Or her Grandma for so many years.
Ananda's is not just situational, though, she can participate in a group fairly well under certain conditions, but she absolutely cannot talk about certain things or when she's been thinking about certain things - namely traumas and separations.
I was incredibly proud of Ananda the other day, like crying from happiness holy crap proud, because she was talking about when Elise was in so much danger and then she said, "I didn't use to be able to talk about that. It was like my jaw was just stuck and I couldn't open my mouth no matter what I did." I told her about selective mutism for the first time, then, and gushed to her about what a huge breakthrough that is and how crazily happy for her I am. I saw the lightbulb in her eyes.
Also, three weeks ago I was checking her math work and something was completely changed. It took me a second - she still got something wrong here or there in her work (4 digit subtraction and multiplication, it was separate assignments), and her handwriting was still a bit messy, but...then it HIT ME - nothing was backwards! NOTHING. Not a single digit in either assignment. I blinked and started searching the pages and then went and showed Grant, who was as surprised as me. It's continued since and after the first week I told her, with a strong emphasis on hugs and pride. And she was all giddy-joyful-grins about it.
Both of these breakthrough make me feel very assured (along with her copious reading and her good self concept) that I am very much doing the right thing for her.
I'm sure she would figure out coping mechanisms to eventually deal with life at public school, and get by. I'm sure it would be torturously stressful for her for a very long time, and rob her of the opportunities she has every day to both explore and excel academically in areas she's interested in (because the amount of child-led learning that goes on around here is staggering) and work through and get past her emotional issues.
If you continue to think she would do fine/well/better in public school, good for you, we'll agree to disagree. But this crazily ignorant hoohaw of "kids adapt!" and "your whole family revolves around Aaron!!" (? this is not something anyone who knows us irl would just EVER think, it is so freaking out of left field) I'm seeing was starting to make me want to explode - dyslexia and selective mutism are not things homeschooling causes or that are just magically overcome by a desire to fit in, in a classroom. This is not a case of, "she's behind in some areas now when she would have been ahead in school", it a case of (as much as anyone can reasonably make an educated guess based on evidence at hand) "she's only a little behind in a couple of areas because she was homeschooled, and ahead in everything else, that's so awesome!". When I said I thought she would be the scholastic kid (out of her and Aaron...Isaac is clearly the scholastic kid at this point) was before we understood the things we do now - like, when she was 4. If you've been reading that long, I'd expect more of you.
On a lighter note, when we got to my friend Kristin's tonight, she was like...
Kristin: If you want to try some of that cake out there, it's got rum in it, and rum in the topping, and I poured rum all over the whole thing.
Me: Ah, right, so it's basically tres rums.
Kristin: Is there a spanish word for "rum"?
Keegan: I think it's just (rolling the r and flourishing her arm) Rrrum!!
Me: Sounds good to me. Tres Rrrums.
It was a banana rum cake and O_O it was soooooooooooooooooooooooo good, I was sitting there playing Candy Land with Elise and 4 year old Aidan and Kristen walked by and I was like...
Me: OOS ESS OOH OOT!
Kristin: *lol*
Me: *finger up, swallowing* Really! This...mmm, this is so good.
Kristin: You know WHY it's so good?
Me: ...because it's basically floating in rum?
Kristin: because it has a whole pound of butter in it. Like four sticks.
Me: O_O What have you done to me?
Kristin: Rum on it's own just makes a cake taste like rubbing alcohol but when you mix it up with enough butter and sugar WOO BOY!
Me: *looking warily at my plate*
I really ate too much of it. But. Om nom nom.
And, when we got home (without all the boys, who are spending the night at Kristin's along with about 15 other kids) it was so sweet to sit up with Ananda and Elise cuddling in bed for an hour just reading (D'Aulaire's) Greek myths and the I Love You storybook Nancy gave us as we left Boston ♥
So.
Ananda is not a brilliant amazing beautiful girl we've robbed of her chances at success by homeschooling her. She is brilliant, and amazing, and beautiful, but she's also complicated, and when I say that it's not me judging her or favoring Aaron - it's my way of shortening some of the following:
She has major social anxiety issues, and has since late infancy. She was a very delayed speaker because she was afraid to perform - when she did start talking, she had what gradually became a severe stutter, that intensified around anyone but us. I freaked about this, I changed pediatricians, I coached my in-laws on how to interact with her, because anytime anybody got impatient or tried to finish her sentences it got drastically worse, and when you could stay totally neutral and pretend it wasn't there, she would "warm up" over the course of a conversation. Thus, speech therapy would have been about the most horrible idea in the world. The ped we switched to was amazed at how well we got her out of stuttering - she continued to do it when she had a developmental leap for awhile, but not in between those leaps.
She was a brilliant artist, incorporating things like long distance perspective and facial expressions into paintings when she was only 2. I used to scan her art in all the time.
Those two things, now, clearly fit into the larger picture of dyslexia, which is not - as many people who are unexposed to it believe - as simple as reversing letters in your mind. It's a whole different way of thinking, her brain works differently. Dyslexic babies can spin objects in their minds to study them from all perspectives. Dyslexic children CAN'T think in words, which is really radical when you study it and consider it - it alters absolutely everything about their experience of daily life vs other kids. Often in good ways, like the artistry and the intuitive understanding of situations - but often in frustrating ways within our society because not thinking in words just does not fit with most traditional schooling methods. It took me a long time to understand that Ananda actually saw letters and numbers (and anything else) moving around on the page. And, of course, whole words and math problems and sentences...
Ananda had amazing visual and listening comprehension and a crazily off the chain attention span from very early, and she was artistic, and she soaked up things like recipes and science and history very easily. I was convinced because of how well she could understand complex things, and her vocabulary, and her exemplary behavior and mature manners, that she was far ahead of the curve when she was 3-5 years old. And she WAS! In those things. But when we started homeschooling she stayed at the same 4 year old level with recognizing and writing letters and numbers, and phonics skills, the whole time she was 5...and 6...and then she turned 7 and still wasn't even beginning to read. As a kid who had poured over book illustrations since infancy and loved to sit at the table and draw it was really counterintuitive to me that she was starting to hate schoolwork. As a well mannered and totally EASY little girl, it was strange to the extreme the way the tears and battles would start over something like, "let's go try to sound out some words". At this point Aaron COULD read, and I was getting kind of freaked out. We were beginning to understand dyslexia after I got a whole thing from PATH about dyslexia, and then talked to our ped about it, and remembered that Bobby (her biological father) is pretty severely dyslexic and it's hereditary.
I believe I helped her conquer her dyslexia and learn to read by systematically applying different approaches with great patience over a period of several months at a time until something worked. I don't believe she would have gotten that sort of treatment in public school. Ultimately, I don't have the foggiest fucking idea how she finally learned to read - she just DID one day. It was like something clicked into place, and bam, she could do it. It was also like a switch was thrown - she started reading, and stopped creating. Before this she was incredible with clay, obsessed with paint, went through crayons like mad...and it switched, no doubt about it. Now, she burns through several chapter books per week at an advanced level but she almost never wants to do any form of art. It still pops out when she's grieving or working through something, but that's kind of it.
I believe the patience, love, and breaks I gave her - along with the consistent chapter per night of reading aloud she's had basically her whole life - while we were working on reading are why she can love it now after such a long struggle, and also why she still feels good about herself and sees herself as a smart kid, even when her little brother was reading first and she would literally sweat and tremble trying to sound words out for years. I have my doubts about whether her self concept and enjoyment of books could have been preserved the same way in a school environment, particularly a school we could afford, in our town.
I have a great book called "The Gift of Dyslexia" that helped me to understand this as not a positive or a negative - but just how she thinks, why she is who she is. I also talked to her about it with an emphasis on the talents and positive quirks and famous dyslexics and read her the book My Name is
This is one piece of the puzzle I label "complicated".
Then, there is some attachment stuff that is...intense. She lived with Grant as Daddy for months and then it switched very abruptly to Bobby, and then it switched back a year and a half later. My mother lived with us or visited constantly for the first 3 years, and then that stopped abruptly. My sister lived with us for the first year and a half and then Annie saw her twice the following year. I am the constant.
And she has had to deal with me dissapearing into the hospital and coming home incapacitated for weeks five different times during the first 8 years of her life. Most recently, she saw me dying and full of tubes in ICU and walked in on Grant packing my wounds. This was the same year the sister she was so excited about nearly died and we had to tell the kids about her brain and then backtrack and so on.
This shit is partially my fault, partially beyond my control, but all horrible. From the mornings when she wouldn't talk, make eye contact or get out of bed to the clingy and weeping over going to a Girl Scout Camp she loved and enjoyed, EVERY MORNING, and then admitting it was great that afternoon...Annie is different because of this stuff. She spends the night at her friend Christina's and goes over on Saturday afternoons, but Christina's parents needed to have an hour to just talk to me about her after the first time because they were really worried. This is the same for the girl who's house she used to go to all the time when she was younger. It seems like she can go somewhere a time or two or be in a big group like in science classes or at dance or camp or PATH events without attracting attention but anytime adults are around her one on one for awhile - like Grant Sr - I get a lot of "Is she ok?"
When I explained selective mutism to Christina's parents they IMMEDIATELY GOT IT which was a huge relief because I didn't have to explain much more. Their neighbor's boy is apparently the same way and so it clicked right away and they went "oooooh, just like ____, that makes total sense!"
Copy and pasted from Google Health:
Overview
Selective mutism is a condition in which a child who can speak well stops speaking, usually in school or social settings.
Symptoms
•Ability to speak at home with family
•Failure to speak in certain social situations
•Fear of people
•Shyness
Keep in mind this was a professional diagnosis from a licensed therapist, who then worked with her for several months and met with us together to get me to stop being mad at her for a seeming refusal to talk. Which I now feel terrible about. Some more:
Parents often think that the child is refusing to speak, but usually the child is truly unable to speak in certain settings...
This syndrome is not the same as mutism. In selective mutism, the child has the ability to both understand and speak, but fails to speak in certain settings or environments. Children with mutism never speak.
My daughter who just shakes her head and refuses to make eye contact when her friends call on the phone. Or her Grandma for so many years.
Ananda's is not just situational, though, she can participate in a group fairly well under certain conditions, but she absolutely cannot talk about certain things or when she's been thinking about certain things - namely traumas and separations.
I was incredibly proud of Ananda the other day, like crying from happiness holy crap proud, because she was talking about when Elise was in so much danger and then she said, "I didn't use to be able to talk about that. It was like my jaw was just stuck and I couldn't open my mouth no matter what I did." I told her about selective mutism for the first time, then, and gushed to her about what a huge breakthrough that is and how crazily happy for her I am. I saw the lightbulb in her eyes.
Also, three weeks ago I was checking her math work and something was completely changed. It took me a second - she still got something wrong here or there in her work (4 digit subtraction and multiplication, it was separate assignments), and her handwriting was still a bit messy, but...then it HIT ME - nothing was backwards! NOTHING. Not a single digit in either assignment. I blinked and started searching the pages and then went and showed Grant, who was as surprised as me. It's continued since and after the first week I told her, with a strong emphasis on hugs and pride. And she was all giddy-joyful-grins about it.
Both of these breakthrough make me feel very assured (along with her copious reading and her good self concept) that I am very much doing the right thing for her.
I'm sure she would figure out coping mechanisms to eventually deal with life at public school, and get by. I'm sure it would be torturously stressful for her for a very long time, and rob her of the opportunities she has every day to both explore and excel academically in areas she's interested in (because the amount of child-led learning that goes on around here is staggering) and work through and get past her emotional issues.
If you continue to think she would do fine/well/better in public school, good for you, we'll agree to disagree. But this crazily ignorant hoohaw of "kids adapt!" and "your whole family revolves around Aaron!!" (? this is not something anyone who knows us irl would just EVER think, it is so freaking out of left field) I'm seeing was starting to make me want to explode - dyslexia and selective mutism are not things homeschooling causes or that are just magically overcome by a desire to fit in, in a classroom. This is not a case of, "she's behind in some areas now when she would have been ahead in school", it a case of (as much as anyone can reasonably make an educated guess based on evidence at hand) "she's only a little behind in a couple of areas because she was homeschooled, and ahead in everything else, that's so awesome!". When I said I thought she would be the scholastic kid (out of her and Aaron...Isaac is clearly the scholastic kid at this point) was before we understood the things we do now - like, when she was 4. If you've been reading that long, I'd expect more of you.
On a lighter note, when we got to my friend Kristin's tonight, she was like...
Kristin: If you want to try some of that cake out there, it's got rum in it, and rum in the topping, and I poured rum all over the whole thing.
Me: Ah, right, so it's basically tres rums.
Kristin: Is there a spanish word for "rum"?
Keegan: I think it's just (rolling the r and flourishing her arm) Rrrum!!
Me: Sounds good to me. Tres Rrrums.
It was a banana rum cake and O_O it was soooooooooooooooooooooooo good, I was sitting there playing Candy Land with Elise and 4 year old Aidan and Kristen walked by and I was like...
Me: OOS ESS OOH OOT!
Kristin: *lol*
Me: *finger up, swallowing* Really! This...mmm, this is so good.
Kristin: You know WHY it's so good?
Me: ...because it's basically floating in rum?
Kristin: because it has a whole pound of butter in it. Like four sticks.
Me: O_O What have you done to me?
Kristin: Rum on it's own just makes a cake taste like rubbing alcohol but when you mix it up with enough butter and sugar WOO BOY!
Me: *looking warily at my plate*
I really ate too much of it. But. Om nom nom.
And, when we got home (without all the boys, who are spending the night at Kristin's along with about 15 other kids) it was so sweet to sit up with Ananda and Elise cuddling in bed for an hour just reading (D'Aulaire's) Greek myths and the I Love You storybook Nancy gave us as we left Boston ♥
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