In Which I Play Catch Up

Remember back when I started this blog and I posted five days a week? Those were the good old days. You know, when the kids actually went to school somewhere other than our house, I could blithely run errands to six places during the day without thinking about it, and I didn't own a collection of masks. Ah, 2019, how we miss you. Who would have thought that breaking my wrist at Kittygirl's birthday party on the last day of January this year would not be the most eventful part of our our family's year?

Anyway, the pandemic isn't the only reason I haven't blogged recently. Life just has a bad habit of getting away from me. I suppose I can partly blame it on ADHD, but that's not the only reason. There are just so many immediate things to be accomplished on a daily basis that things like finally sitting down and blogging fall by the wayside. Who am I kidding? It's not just blogging. It's also important but not every day task things that fall by the wayside, like scooping the little boxes and cleaning the guinea pig cage. You do not want to know how much poop was in the litter box when I cleaned it this weekend.

To update you on my last post, Squirrelboy was super excited to receive a letter of acceptance to the National Honor Society a couple weeks ago. Looking back on his early school experience I'm just blown away by how far he's come. I'm regularly amazed by how much he cares about school and how hard he works to submit his best effort. Many of his teachers allow retakes of tests and quizzes. This weekend he retook a geometry quiz twice to get a perfect score. Reader, he got 18/20 the first time so it's not as if he absolutely needed to retake it at all.

I completely missed posting during Diabetes Awareness Month in November, so here's an executive summary of what you should know about type 1 diabetes if you're unfamiliar with it: It's an autoimmune disease. It is not caused by diet. It is lifelong unless a cure is found. It can strike at any age. In fact, about half of new diagnoses are in adults. It's relentless, and something you have to deal with 24 hours a day every.single.day. The one bright spot to having diabetes or having a child with diabetes is the diabetes community, which is amazing. See last November's daily posts for details about these statements and much more.

With this year being totally out of whack, our big summer vacation plans being cancelled, and more recently Thanksgiving and Christmas travel to Grandma and Grandpa's house being cancelled, it's been nice to immerse ourselves in our familiar Advent traditions. In case you don't know, Advent is celebrated beginning four Sundays before Christmas. The name comes from the Latin word "coming", and it is a time to step back, reflect, and prepare to celebrate the coming of Jesus at Christmas as well as to reflect on Jesus' eventual second coming.

We established a tradition when Squirrelboy was quite young of lighting an Advent wreath every evening as a family and reading both a Bible passage and a fun Christmas story. After the reading the kids get to open the Advent calendar. Our Advent setup is below. My ADHD brain, while it struggles to make routines happen, at the same time functions much better when they're in place and established as habits, so Advent, as a many years long habit, is a particularly meaningful time to me and a pleasant break from the chaos that December often brings to a family with school age kids. There's a lot less chaos this year what with the pandemic cancelling so many activities, but at the same time the pandemic causes its own chaos, even if it's just internal, so the break is still welcome.

Another of our Advent traditions is the annual visits of Sam, our Elf on the Shelf, and Isaiah John, our shepherd. I'm presuming you know what an Elf on the Shelf looks like, reader, and if you don't, I'll spare you his slightly creepy visage. I will, however, introduce you to Isaiah John, who is quite cute.

Isaiah John's visit reminds us to focus on Jesus during Advent, as he spends every night while we sleep searching for Baby Jesus, whom he always, conveniently, finds just in time for Christmas morning.  Isaiah John also returns just before Easter, looking for a sheep he seems to lose every year at about the same time. Silly Isaiah John.

Surprisingly, the pandemic hasn't been as bad for our family as you might think it would have been. I think following routines has been part of the key to that. Our kids have consistent places to do their schoolwork, I'm able to give them consistent supervision, one of their favorite activities (scouting) has continued with a mix of digital and outdoor meetings and activities, and we've been able to have unrushed family dinners nearly every night.

I'll be happy when the U.S. is able to get the pandemic under control (not until a decent portion of the population has received a vaccine is looking like the likely timeframe) and we can return to normal activities and normal life, but for the moment I'm choosing to focus on the things that are going well. For whatever reason, that doesn't seem to leave much time for blogging :).

 

In Which Squirrelboy is Nominated for the National Honor Society

 I was pretty much the ideal student all the way through school. I learned to read mostly on my own in kindergarten, even though reading wasn't formally taught until first grade back in the dark ages of the 1980's. I learned easily in the way that schools teach, and I was eager to learn. I was an excellent test taker. I was polite and never disruptive in the classroom. The only negative comments teachers ever had about me were that I could speak up a little bit more than I did. Even though I am certain I have ADHD, my ADHD had no apparent effect on my school performance at any level. I did miss or come late to class a handful of time in college when I was fully in charge of my schedule, but it's not like that's really weird for any college student. My ADHD didn't really become disruptive until I had lives other than mine to be concerned about (ie, until I became a parent).

Squirrelboy's school experience has not quite been the opposite of mine, but it has absolutely been very different. Because he's generally kind and polite (not always to me and Mr. Engineer, but, hey, he's a teenager) he has usually been well liked by his teachers. However, every single academic thing about school has always been hard for him thanks to his dyslexia and ADHD.

In kindergarten, as I've shared before, his teacher assured us for the first half of the year that he'd catch onto reading eventually. She told us it was common for kids, especially boys, to not really understand reading during the fall of kindergarten but suddenly make a big leap forward in the third quarter of the year. Spoiler alert: Squirrelboy never made that leap.

Once we got the official dyslexia diagnosis, it became abundantly clear that learning to read well would never be a process of leaping for him or of "the turning of a key" as is sometimes described. It would be a process of methodical, tiny steps up a steep hill toward the goal. Though there are schools out there that have the resources and the will to teach students with dyslexia in a way that works for their brains, Squirrelboy's school was not one of them. The way the school was teaching reading was never going to work with him.

Even when we came with this evidence in hand, however, Squirrelboy's kindergarten teacher was insistent that the best possible thing for him was to repeat kindergarten. This despite the overwhelming evidence that the way he was being taught was not appropriate for the way his brain worked. She still thought it would be best for him to spend another year being taught the same things in the same way. You know, the things that didn't work for him the first time.

Fortunately, our school system does not under normal circumstances for students to repeat a grade. They leave that choice up to the parents. We were blessed to be well educated, be native speakers of English, not be minorities, and have personal experience with dyslexia through Mr. Engineer. We insisted that Squirrelboy be passed on to first grade and it happened. First grade was a pretty miserable year learning-wise with a lot of tears, but by second grade, thanks to a lot of hours of tutoring outside of school by experts, Squirrelboy was beginning to catch up.

Even when he was mostly caught up, however, learning in the way the school expected was always an uphill battle for Squirrelboy. He worked ten times harder for any A or B he received than the average student. Homeschooling him for middle school provided a three year breather in which we could forget about grades entirely and focus on helping him enjoy learning again.

When he went off to high school, Mr. Engineer and I were nervous. He still had a serious problem paying attention to details, which showed up in his work. He also did not always seem to care about doing his best work. We thought his first semester of high school might need to serve as a wakeup call for him to always pay attention, do his best work, and ask for help when necessary. Since his school requires students to retake core courses if they don't earn an 83% or higher, we thought he might even have to retake one or two classes.

We were wrong. Squirrelboy immediately cared deeply both about his grades and about working hard to do his best work. He came out of the first semester with three A's and two high B's. He finished the second semester with all A's. So far in his sophomore year he has all A's. I would be among the first to tell you that it's not all about grades. Squirrelboy hasn't only earned good grades. He has invested in his learning, worked on becoming more independent, and learned to advocate and stand up for himself when he needs accommodations because of the way his brain works.

Because I was the perfect student, being nominated and then selected for the National Honor Society was not a surprise to me. It was, however, a huge surprise to Squirrelboy last week when he received an email with an invitation to apply to join the National Honor Society. He's been diligently working on the application, making sure it's his best work and represents not only his academic achievement but his service to his community, particularly through Boy Scouts. I have no idea how competitve the process of admission into his school's chapter of the National Honor Society is. Having the opportunity to fill out the application is not a guarantee that he will get in. However, just being nominated is a huge honor and shows just how far he's come. He's striding toward a successful future. I wish his kindergarten teacher could see him now.