Category: The Life of Lara

It’s all here. Adventures in extreme knitting, the house of poop, and suburban permaculture. You may also find rants about politics, ecology, humanitarianism, responsible living, toe floss, and other topics not covered here. Expect profanity and irreverence. You have been warned.

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!

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.