Starting over....

Well, we're into month two of school year 2010-11, and in many respects it's a time of starting over. I'm starting to reaquaint myself with this blog (and writing in general; thanks, writing buddies!); I'm starting life without small children at home all day again for the first time in ten years. And as of this week we're starting over with the issue of D's medication. After banging our collective heads against the wall for a month, we have concluded that reverting to meds is the only way to survive this school year.

I'm hoping it's going to work. I'm already noticing that he's brought his homework home every day this week. I'm noticing that his mood has generally improved, whether due to the medication or due to the fact that he's having more successes on a daily basis, I'm not sure. I'm noticing he is not finishing his sandwiches at lunch. And I'm noticing that I am regularly going to bed at night while he is still up in his room, reading by flashlight. I hope that the good continues to outweigh the bad but I'm keeping a watchful eye on the whole thing as it develops.

For anyone reading this who doesn't know the back story, perhaps a little exposition:

D is in fifth grade now, and over the course of his short life has been in three different schools. In kindergarten, he went to his neighborhood school and actually had a lovely year--he had a wonderful teacher who understood him as well as anyone can, and liked him too. But we were not confident of this school's ability to meet his needs in the later grades. We pulled him out to put him in a school that had an advanced learning program, hoping that that would both meet his needs academically and give him a cohort of other kids like himself with whom to bond. But we had a horrible lapse in judgment when choosing the school. It was three years before we could get him out of there and into the school where he is now, which, while not perfect, is I think a better fit for him and for our family.

We knew D was "different" from a very young age. On the one hand he was extremely bright, creative, and verbally precocious, sounding like a little professor by age two or three. In preschool he learned how to make speakers from scratch (using paper, wires, and magnets) that would actually produce sound. He would build elaborate constructions with just about any kind of building material, combining things in new and interesting ways. He was uber-curious about the natural world and loved to go on hikes and find interesting flowers, mushrooms, and rocks; he liked to learn about them and teach others about them. At the same time he was socially inflexible and had odd deficits that were difficult to categorize. He refused to draw. He refused to do any kind of preschool project instigated by another person (peer or teacher). Whenever presented with a complex environment, social or sensory, he would retreat or act out. Hidden picture tasks gave him anxiety and he would refuse to look at them. He refused to read for us. He started kindergarten apparently "not reading" and within a month was reading complex chapter books.

His is a summer birthday and we debated red-shirting him from kindergarten, but we feared he would be bored if we held him back. So we put him in. We should have kept him out, but hindsight is 20/20, so they say.

We spent the next few years trying to figure out why our bright creative son was struggling so much socially, and why he was producing little to no work in the classroom. Friends seemed to move in and out of his life unpredictably; just when he thought things were going swimmingly something would happen (he could never tell what) that would leave him friendless, running circles around the playground at recess and stopping to peer out the cyclone fence at the world beyond. His chronic difficulties eventually spun us into Student Intervention Team meetings and hours and hours of diagnostic tests in the second grade, and eventually appointments with professional psychologists, where we finally began to get some answers. He was found to be "highly gifted", at the 99.99th percentile on academic achievement and IQ tests. He was also found to exhibit characteristics of ADHD and Aspergers. Further testing and evaluation revealed the ADHD diagnosis to be the correct one.

While D had a mostly miserable time at that second school, I will always be grateful to that team that helped us find the answers we were seeking. D had some real advocates among them. They suggested we get D into the local APP (Accelerated Progress Program) school, which they thought might alleviate the boredom that was leading to some of his output problems. They thought we might also be able to find a community of professionals accustomed to dealing with these kids (colloquially called "twice-exceptional", or 2E, by the community) and a community of the kids themselves that might make D feel at home.

I wish I could say this was the happy ending to the story, but of course like all things in life it is not that simple. D still struggles socially, and while he has his friendships they strike me as tenuous and vulnerable. When things go awry he has no confidence in his ability to fix them. While he is more interested in the material being presented in the classroom he still runs up against his ADHD limitations when it comes time to produce work. This is common to many 2E children, who require the stimulation of the advanced material to perform, but do not have the ability to keep up with the work expectations of these APP classrooms. He ends up feeling like the "dumb one" in his class of brainiacs. While medications undoubtedly make a difference in his ability to concentrate (and collaborate!) in school, we are always eventually driven off of them by the side effects (inability to sleep and eat) that make them eventually unworkable.

But we are trying again, a tiny tiny dose to give a little boost while minimizing the disabling side effects. We are meeting with people and trying to develop a support network to help us help him. We want him to succeed socially and academically while not compromising the things that make him the unique and amazing kid that he is.

And he is; he really, really is.