Explaining Egypt

Some things are particularly hard to explain to children. My daughter likes the animated movie "Prince of Egypt" which covers the dealings of Moses with the Pharoah as told in Exodus. My daughter is also extremely sensitive, particularly with babies, moms, and with anything dying.

The beginning of the movie, I was able to cover explaining the bad guys killing all the babies. It upset her but at least the concept of bad guys doing bad things makes sense to her. Harder to explain was the punishments set forth from God, and especially of course, the death of all the first borns. How do you explain that? Even understanding it, it is a painful thing to watch played out.

In other news, this is my third attempt at publishing a post. Been having connection problems but hopefully that has been resolved. It's also kept me from posting comments though too so I've been a bit out of touch.

Total And Complete Mental Exhaustion

I am completely mentally exhausted. (Hence the title). I had a meeting yesterday at my daughter's school to discuss her language eval and her extended school year (summer) services. As I mentioned before, my daughter has a learning disability. She looks, acts, and seems so normal that it is often easy to forget about it, or at least tuck large parts of it under the proverbial rug.

So she qualifies now for speech/language services. She didn't before because she was given the Kindergarten assessment which doesn't include an expressive language test. And of course, expressive language is where she has the most difficulty. The therapist conducting the assessment was surprised at how high (good thing) her language comprehension was. Usually children have more correlation between their expressive and comprehensive language abilities. But M's language comprehension is actually quite good, surprisingly enough. Not surprising though, is her expressive language abilities. It's like she can get the information, understand what you are saying, but can't pass information from her brain to her mouth. She will "forget" common words like, uhm, tree. She can describe it upside down and backwards, but she can't verbalize the word "tree" (for example). Then another time she can do it fine.

So anyway, she will now be getting help for that.

Just yesterday, they completed some end of year testing with her. Her reading is still abominably low. She can identify words in one instance, and then not know them two sentences later, only for them to "come back" again later. She can't sound out words because she has forgotten the beginning sounds by the time she finishes the ending sounds.

The only area that has seen moderate improvement is numbers. And thank God for that. That "know it then not know it then know it again" has plagued her terribly with her numbers and they have been nearly impossible to get through her short term memory. We spent months just trying to "learn" the number 7!

But her difficulties are so so very damaging to her "school" learning ability. It was overwhelmingly disheartening to hear her evaluation reports. Everyone says over and over how sweet she is, how she tries so hard and works so diligently. But there is some kind of barrier in her brain that just won't let things through, either going in or coming out. It breaks my heart. I fear so greatly for her future. At 7, she has a learning disorder, which no one holds against her. As an adult, she'll just be seen as "dumb". She works so hard it's just not fair!

My chest hurts and my heart weeps. I wish so, so badly I could take this on for her instead.

School Zone

We had an orientation tonight for my son's new school. Next year he will be moving on from his grade school to begin 4th grade in the 4 thru 6 consolidated school. Till now, he's been attending a school comprised of students living in his own school district. Beginning at 4th grade, all the students from all the city's school districts come together in one building. It's a bit intimidating. It makes for a school size of over 1200. I graduated from a school who's entire student body didn't break 400. I think I've done pretty well at keeping my concerns and worries away from my son. I don't want him to take on my fears. He's pretty adaptable though. What would socially terrify me doesn't phase him in the least. He sees 1140 new people as 1140 new friends.

I don't think he's believes there is a soul out there who wouldn't want to be his friend - not out of arrogance, but more out of simple oblivion. He lives in a world where people skip around holding hands and rejection doesn't exist. Rejection? What's that? And I know at times kids in his class didn't want him around. We tried to keep him off meds for his ADD for as long as possible. Behavior modifications addressed his school performance and behaviors but didn't help him with his silliness and keeping his hands to himself. But he took that in stride, almost oblivious to it.

Anyway, I'm sure he'll adjust to the changes better than I will. It won't be long into the new school year before every adult in the building will be on close personal terms with him. It's just the way he is.