So, basically, once he was in school and I started wondering about achievement and letter reversals and homework frustration and all that - I already had a big clue in the previous testing, but I continued to think it was simply perfectionism or quirkiness or whatever, because that's all the folks who'd tested him said about it.
This is my biggest beef with everything going on. The Kindy teacher was discussing remediation. After testing and finding an elevated IQ, why would such a smart child getting such intensive help still not perform on average levels to peers? Even with a tough curriculum? Even at his age, unless there's something else going on? IDK.
ps - the other piece of data we had (and didn't realize we had) was ds' developmental history - there are a ton of indications he was dyspraxic when he was very young (late crawling, late sitting, not really crawling, not really sitting, late talking etc)… but he was just so darned cute it never occurred to us anything was not on track. Plus I'd walked/etc late, and the men in ds' family are notorious for not talking. Soooo… we just thought, hey, he's quirky and he's cute. If I'd *known* about dyspraxia or if our ped had once even mentioned how far on the "late" side of developmental milestones ds was, I'd have been more on-the-ball with realizing something was up.
DS was premature by 5 weeks so his development was normal after being adjusted for his prematurity (but barely). Except talking was always great. Dyspraxia was mentioned by a PT as a possibility, but we'll be getting OT help now I think.
Now back to ds - he absolutely knew something wasn't working for him re writing when he was in Kindergarten and beyond - finding out what was up through testing was a huge relief for him. Even if we'd not had any lost opportunities to remediate through early diagnosis, simply being able to let him know it was something other than his "fault" - being able to explain it to him early on - would have made a world of difference to his psyche, and in helping buoy his self-confidence.
I just tell DS that his brain is too smart for his hands and we have to make his hands smarter to write to keep up with his brain (as I strongly suspect dysgraphia). If there's dyslexia as well I'll have to come up with a new way to explain it. He's so easy going. I know he's frustrated too.
