Well, with the help of Not Your Average Blogger, I finally got around to doing some work in our flower bed. The weeds are no longer taller than the azalea bushes. Progress. Baby steps. Whatever, I'll try again next year. The rest of the yard looks pretty good.
Work is about to enter a phase of insanity. The elections are next week, which means I will basically go to work Tuesday night and not come home until Wednesday night, and then I will shuttle between the office and home but spend pretty much all the rest of my time under a laptop for three straight days.
With all that, what better time to schedule a party? The kid's annnual Halloween Event will be held Friday this year. As the kids get older, I'm making things a little scarier for them -- holding it at sundown instead of mid-afternoon, and this year we've set up a "haunted lab" in our laundry room. I dunno. It's not particularly scary, and yesterday the Young Prince reproached me for always having his events in the basement instead of our living room (I guess it's not a party until someone's thrown up on the couch?) but it should be fun, I hope. I realized yesterday that I committed a cardinal error in not keeping the e-mail lists from his last two years of school -- there would be a much larger guest list. Oh, well. Live and learn. Ten kids is enough, no?
In other scary news -- we got the report back from the analyst about the Young Prince. He is now more or less officially ADHD-combined form. (That is, the report is written, but some other doctor is giving it the once-over before they let us see the thing in its entirety.) They couldn't determine if he has some touch of Asperbergers, because all his handlers have such wildly divergent answers about his coping skills.
Well. This changes everything. Except, really, it doesn't change a damn thing.
So, we have a label. And I guess that is something we can use as an excuse when things go badly, and maybe use it for some kind of special classroom consideration or extra indulgence in Important Tests or I don't know what. But the thing is, the label isn't really any huge help. It isn't like, "Oh, your kid has asthma, we will give him an inhaler," or "Oh, your kid has scurvy, let's feed him some citrus." There isn't really any concrete diagnosis and course of treatment. It's more like playing whack-a-mole with the various things that pop up. Fix how he always hummed in class, watch him lose focus on classwork. Fix the focus, watch him start to fight with classmates. Get him so he understands how to work in a group, watch him ... I don't know, start setting fires or something.
And putting a tag on his sometimes-looly behavior doesn't really change the fact that we have expectations that he will manage this looly behavior to the best of his ability. We aren't bothering to tell him that he's got a label now, because what is the point? He'd just latch on to it as some new and strange identifier and reason Not to Do Things. I've always held him to certain standards -- which, admittedly, probably aren't as high as other parents set for their kids, but they are standards nonetheless, and I will continue to set them and hold him to them. I can only assume they are a reasonable standards; sometimes he meets them, sometimes not. And usually when he doesn't, he understands what he did wrong, we talk about how to do it right, and why he can't keep messing it up. Isn't that how this works for pretty much everyone else?
The most I'm hoping for out of this, I guess, is that these experts who see this all the time and blablabla will actually have some theories and strategies to make things a little easier for the poor kid. Nobody wants to medicate him at this point, and that makes me happy. We've instituted a lot of changes at home -- way more exercise, some diet changes, other stuff. He seems to be doing better in school this year; our first Meeting with School Officials didn't leave me nearly as miserable and hopeless as previous encounters, though there are still areas that need work, obviously. But he seems to be doing well on tests,and he brings home positive behavior cards more often than not these days, so something is working -- he's figuring it out, we are making a difference, his teacher is much more on our wavelength than in years past? Whatever, I'll take it.
And he continues to be off-the-charts smart with the stuff I'm showing him at home, so I can't help but hope we are going the right direction. He's whipped through the kid version of the Odyssey and knows all the monsters by heart. He is still rabid about Dr. Who, and I can't recommend that show enough as it has sparked his interest in Van Gogh, Italy and Winston Churchill, not to mention outer space and filmmaking. He's perceptive, he sees connections between things that continually surprise me, and I think he's still mostly happy. He's still proud of us, which is nice -- he's the only kid I see at parties and school events who drags friends over to meet his parents. Perhaps he just needs to be 30 to be functional. Working in small groups doesn't have to be as important then, depending on his career choice. Right?
Next year. 3rd grade. Everything is going to even out. The other kids will have caught up to a reasonable level of the YP's intellect, and he will have caught up to a reasonable level of expected social behaviors. Everyone hits a balance around that age, and suddenly, the brilliant kids can stand the slow kids, and the sporty kids can stand the brainy kids, and the social kids can stand the shy kids, and for a magical three years, everyone can be friends. Your trouble will all start again with the influx of hormones in 6th grade, but labels or no, 3rd through 5th grades should be very good for the YP. And you have 3 years to prepare for the tween years. ;)
Posted by: lane | October 25, 2010 at 11:05 PM