But as gratified and so many of you wrote...a lot of teachers rarely if ever encounter a truly HG kid. So my friends' experience is the norm. I do believe that they can be right about students/parents in general and we (my husband and I) can be right about Graham. That helped.
The way I've put it before is that I can't blame others if they think I'm nuts, since I so often think it myself.
HG is really really "out there" and even though we've got these kids around all the time, making them look pretty normal to us, no one else has that. It's not surprising that ours come across as somewhat unbelievable -- they really are tremendously unlikely!
I wanted to add one other thing about the polite conversation... maybe two... lol.... I generally don't talk about DS locally because I don't want him to be "open for discussion". Once you've raised the topic, it sort of becomes public property, and I don't want that. Gossip, however, gets the word around. I happen to be best friends with the one of the best gossipers in town, so I can "feed" the mill with what I want out there, without having to do the talking myself. It's a subtle difference, but it means that I can be perfectly civil to people that I know would be more than happy to argue about our schooling choices if I gave them an opening, and they don't bring it up because it would be admitting to knowing something they heard "under the table". But at the same time anyone who really needs a sympathetic ear knows where to find me. Yay for small towns....
