Author: laranettle

Children are weird

Mine is currently rolling around a problem in his head – he is hilarious, but his friends don’t yet get it. They ask him to stop being hilarious, but he is convinced that if he keeps being hilarious, eventually they will get the joke, and everyone will have a good laugh. In the meantime, they are throwing rocks at him. Actual rocks. And he keeps cracking jokes.

I put it to him that “most children are assholes”, and that expecting them to change will be an exercise in frustration, so he had better choose between sharing his gifts, and protecting his soft fleshy bits.

He is taking this under advisement, but thinks that hiding his light under a bushel won’t allow him to be true to himself. Ergo, children are weird.

Meanwhile, round three of “meetings with the school” starts tomorrow. Wish us luck!

What do you want for dinner tonight?

I ask the question.

Squish: I want to go to that place. You know, the one I like but I can’t remember the name of?

Mama: Xi An Food Bar? (Our fave “rustic” Chinese noodle joint).

S: Yes.

M: Hmmm. I’m getting a bit bored with that one.

S: I feel the opposite. Like I want to go there more and more.

M: Hmm.

S: But you respect my opinions, and I’m going to respect yours. We can go somewhere else if you like.

May the 4th

This time last year we were just settling in to Auckland, and visiting Hobbiton.

Not much has really changed. Squish is still (mostly) going to school happily enough, Mark seems to be enjoying arguing with data sets at work, and I am ticking along, mostly being a mum, and advocating for Squish at school, and also as the area delegate for Creative Fibre.

We all miss home. I miss watching my favourite little people growing up, miss watching Squish interact with his cousins and his grandparents. Mum and Dad have been here for a visit last month, and Bev & Ted are coming in a few weeks too, but it’s not the same as being able to see them every week. I guess homesickness has kicked in with the weather getting colder here.

Our little house in Westmere is a lot like the house in Denistone where Mark and I first lived together. It’s a draughty old council house that hasn’t had a kitchen renovation since it was built in (probably) the late 1930’s. But the location couldn’t be better, we see the sea every day as we drive down to our street, we are about 100m away from a gorgeous public reserve and a bit further to the community garden. The Countdown (Woolworths) is a 4 minute walk away, and the bus that goes from there goes right past Inigo’s school to Mark’s work.

I have met some wonderful new friends, and although uni doesn’t seem to be working out at the moment, life is good.

Riding!

Squid has been riding his scooter since Grandma and Papa brought it over, and his balance has been getting better and better.

He’s been reluctant to transfer his skills over to a pedalled bike, but since his school now has a spiffy new bike track (and the gates are open on the weekends!), we decided to take the bike for a spin.

The bike was a Christmas present when he was 5, but it has hardly been ridden.  Mark took the pedals off a few months ago so that he could use it as a balance bike, but it’s been hard to convince him to try.

Today, we had another go.  And after 2 goes around without pedals, he was ready to try the pedals.

Twice exceptional

Squishy Electronics

We finally took the plunge and spent the money to have a full educational psych assessment for His Squishyness. $825 for two sessions over two days of 2 hours each. Except that he took so long, each session took three hours, and we were asked to come back for another hour the next day. On the third day, he answered more questions, and his fluid reasoning score increased – but he still left some of the questions unanswered.

He’s bright. Really bright. Like genius level clever.

But so fricking slow that it’s hard for a teacher to notice the clever. Like someone gave him a huge library of information to pack into his brain, but the librarian is senile. And maybe on psychoactive drugs.

He’s above the 99th percentile in general intelligence, but at the 27th percentile for cognitive efficiency. That is well into learning difficulty territory.

This “asynchrony” is referred to as being “Twice Exceptional”. Which means that we have a kid with a brain the size of a planet, who also has a significant learning difficulty. He’ll need extra time than most kids on lots of things, and less time on others. It’s going to mean he’ll need some really wonderful, creative, and patient teachers, and parents. There is also a very strong (99%) chance that he also has either Inattentive ADD, or something similar, but that is yet to be diagnosed fully.

It means we’ve been on the right track with how we have parented him, and how we have pursued the right educational opportunities, and not just let things slide. And now we have a lot of work to do, but at least we’ll have support, and guidance.