by beagooddad on February 7, 2012
Geetle had one of the funniest powerful and genuine emotions the other day.
We had been procrastinating on telling her about the test she is going to need to take next week for potential placement in the gifted program. We were completely expecting her to be pissed for one or more of a few very real reasons:
1) Gifted program is probably in another school and she will have to make some new friends.
2) Bus ride to potential different school would take longer.
We are not sure if she knows about the program being in another school, though. So the main complaint we expected was:
3) OMG. That is going to mean that my 5 minutes of homework a night is going to stretch into 15 totally miserable minutes of thinking. After school even. When I should be playing!
So the other day we finally told her about the test and she nearly blew up. We tried to play dumb and very calmly ask her what her concerns were. After all, if she has a really valid one, we will at least listen to it and try to work with that concern to make it go as well as possible.
Next Saturday, she has swim class in the morning. Then the test. Then she (and Giggles and Pookie) is going out to spend the night with my parents (or my sis and BIL depending on how you classify it when they all live in the same house). How about we say say they are heading west for the night which is one of her favorite things to do.
She ended up nearly in tears when she finally told us what her real concern was.
And I quote: “It will ruin my whole weekend!”
Yep. My daughter doesn’t want to test for the gifted program that could help ensure a top notch college and a top notch career making the kind of money someone with her aspirations is going to need because the length of the test will ruin her whole weekend.
And just like that, I realized how much like me she really is.
by beagooddad on January 30, 2012
The twins turn nine tomorrow. I’ll deal with that later.
Yesterday, we were visiting BeAGoodMom’s family. Geetle sat in the chair one row back but on the passenger side instead of directly behind me. She spent most of the drive playing her new LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7 on her Nintendo DS. After a while she got bored and started leaning. I thought she had fallen asleep.
About 15 minutes from home, I stretched out and put my arm behind BeAGoodMom’s chair for a bit. Before I could safely return it to the steering wheel where it always is for perfect safety, Geetle grabbed my hand…and just held it. No silly games. No wrestling. No words. Normally, the only time I can get that kind of calm affection from her is when we read in her bed before bed.
My arm started to tingle from poor circulation but I probably would have accidentally driven the new Ford Flex off of a cliff before letting go of that hand.
Wonder if she’ll still do that stuff when she is a nine year-old tomorrow.
by beagooddad on January 26, 2012
Believe it or not, there is a little school problem brewing and it has nothing to do with Pookie’s education.
Geetle has been invited to take a test in a couple Saturdays that will be used to determine if she will be invited to the district’s gifted program in 4th grade. If she doesn’t take the test (or we decide to not send her for 4th grade), the next opportunity would be during 6th grade for 7th grade placement.
Yes, I understand all of the pros. I was a borderline gifted student despite my greatest attempts to pretend to not be and to avoid any and all expectations the teachers had for me. I hung around the gifted kids and did homework with them once in a while and see what they went on to do with their lives. Some amazing, some sad. To this day, I’m sad about a few opportunities that I turned down or didn’t get a chance to do starting in 1st grade all the way through college.
But there is a real con to consider. No, the con has nothing to do with social stuff. That all balances itself out. Most of the gifted type of people that I knew back in the day have great social lives now. Just like most of the kids that took the regular classes.
The big con is that in our district, the kids get cored into one school (or maybe two) in the district. No more attending our home school. After BeAGoodMom and I had to fight in IEP meetings before Kindergarten, 1st, 2nd, and finally winning in 3rd grade before Pookie was allowed to come back to our home school and seeing how much more amazing things at school are for him, it is very difficult to imagine sending Geetle away from the home school so quickly.
It isn’t a deal breaker. We will have her take the test and see if she gets accepted before worrying about what we want to do about it. But it does annoy me how much schools try to group kids at such a young age based on their perceived future learning potential. We have such a strange desire to learn so much so quickly so we can get into a decent college. That’s all everyone really seems to think about is getting into those elite colleges and using the degree from there to get jobs that make more money…but I digress.
I also received an email today talking about the Spanish immersion type program they do in our district starting in Kindergarten where you go through school being primarily taught in Spanish. The twins were a year too old when the program started so we never had to think about it. It is definitely something we will have to think about for Giggles when she goes to Kindergarten in a couple years.
Wouldn’t it be kind of funny if a few years from now, Pookie is the only one of our 3 kids getting a “regular” education in a traditional classroom.
by beagooddad on January 24, 2012
I am definitely not an expert on autism. I’m barely competent at dealing with the flavors of autism that manifest in Pookie. I have tried over the years to talk about things as we are going through them which frequently helps me when I look back through the archives. There is quite a lot of his development buried in those posts. There are quite of lot of examples about ways to push Pookie to advance and a lot of examples on laying off of him to give him the space he needs. So at least all of those posts have been useful to me.
I pretty much took off all of last year to try to make sure I had time to do my job, take my classes, and be a decent parent and husband. I still have a job with a minor promotion, I am closer to getting my degree, my kids still like me, and BeAGoodMom has kept me around so I must have had some kind of success.
As I’ve started writing again this year, I’ve noticed a lot of ideas pop into my head for post ideas. Some are big enough that I will never get around to preparing them, some of them fluff enough that I guarantee they will show up, and one that would make a very…well, some kind of book. Part memoir, part autism parenting, part silly maybe.
I have never really wanted to write a non-fiction book and am hesitant to write a “book about autism” because I don’t want to end up sounding like a crazy Jenny McCarthy pretend know it all. But I do like to write. I have a fair amount of structure of potential chapters (but not all of the details of what will be in those chapters). A surprisingly complete picture of what I could do with it. And a desire to try to publish an e-book on the Amazon Kindle.
Again, with class just starting up and some things that I am working on with my career, I’m not sure if I’ll have much free time to pursue it but it does seem to be nagging around in the back of my head in an interesting way.
by beagooddad on January 23, 2012
In ten days, the twins will be 9 years old. About 9 years and a month ago, we ditched SoonToBeAGoodMom’s Cavalier and bought a 2002 Mazda MPV.
We drove all three of the kids home from the hospital in that sweet ride. We’ve driven the kids to emergency rooms, vacations, our for ice cream, to basketball practice. We’ve stopped in random parking lots to make kids sit on the naughty chair…more like naught concrete in those situations, I guess. We’ve stopped in random parking lots to clean up the kids throw up on the way home. Two of those times were different trips home from the Wisconsin Dells.
BeAGoodMom have used that car for anniversary trips, date nights, and for one of us to sneak out for ice cream after the kids go to bed.
So today, when we left the MPV in the parking lot at Carmax and drove home in our new to us 2009 Ford Flex, you could probably imagine me being sad. You would be wrong.
The Ford Flex is way more comfortable, way quieter (assuming kids weren’t in it), smells way less like the faint aroma of up to 8 year old milk, and just looks way cooler. Plus, the Ford Flex is making BeAGoodMom happy.
