A lot can happen in a week. First, I got invited to an interview at my first choice graduate school. I’m very excited and also terribly nervous. I have a bit less than two weeks to prep for the interview. I’m not even sure exactly what prepping I should do, but have already started to pick the brains of everyone I can think of who ever went on a graduate school interview. What am I going to wear?!
Next, we finally got an updated copy of C’s GIEP less than 24 hours before our meeting with the school district. It gave us very little time to digest what we were reading, some of which was quite surprising. It turns out that C’s testing last week didn’t go as smoothly as we thought. While we were only told at the time that he was fidgety and lost interest before they could complete the testing, but the report contained a rather lengthy list of test behaviors going as far as quantifying how many times C dropped his pencil during each test.
I was a bit heartbroken when I read the report, because C was obviously in distress to have been acting the way they claimed (which included rolling around on the floor). It was quite a lot more than fidgeting and if we had known the truth we wouldn’t have taken him back for the afternoon session. His test results (the pieces he actually completed) ended up being skewed and did not reflect his actual knowledge or abilities. They said he had trouble measuring and telling time, two things he has no problems with at home. More important than the test results, they confronted us the next day about having C evaluated for ADHD.
Back in August I shared some of my thoughts about ADD. Since then it’s been in the back of my head that C may need an evaluation at some point, especially since attention and distractibility came up as areas of concern on C’s sensory profile at his OT evaluation in December. Still, there is a lot of overlap in behaviors between giftedness, SPD (Sensory Processing Disorder) and ADD/ADHD. Allergies can cause some of the same behaviors as well and C is a very allergic kid. So I’m still not convinced C has ADD, but it looks likely that our school district will label him as such.
Of course I found a way to stress myself out even further by panicking once more about little Z’s speech development. He’s been making progress with initial consonant deletion and putting two words together more often, but seemed to have made very little progress towards sentences. Most of his two word phrases were just describing objects (blue circle, big shirt, etc.) or asking for more (more shapes, more crackers). He rarely put three words together and often sounds like a broken record, repeating the same word over and over again. Suddenly it hit me how far behind he is from many other kids his age (and his brother at that age, even though I know I shouldn’t compare). I read a comment that his cousin who is 5 months younger said a complex sentence and then just started to second guess everything. Is he really making enough progress? Are we even working on the right things? Is there something bigger going on?
Well, little Z had a surprise in for me and started this week to put three words together more often (though still infrequently) and using -ing words. He’s talked about hiding, eating and reading in just the past few days. It was just what I needed to get out of panic mode and put my thoughts back to all the other (more constructive) stuff I should be focusing on!
