Thank you, aeh, for the welcome, and thank you for the detailed feedback on DD's profile. I really appreciate you taking the time, both for this post, and for others you've made that I've learned a lot from.

Yes DD is delightful! It's been amazing to watch her drive and creativity. She's very much her own person.

1. My mind is open on the issue of DD being Autistic. I agree that she has some traits that are unusual in Autistic people. Her younger brother has ASD-1, ADHD and gifted diagnoses. When DS was diagnosed, I read a lot about autism. Some things I read reminded me of DD. Here are a few examples from the social realm:
- Recently, I showed DD a quiz about love languages for fun. She was very excited about her top "love language". She insisted her father take the quiz. When he ended up with a different top "love language", DD had a meltdown bigger than we've seen in years. She was angry because she thought that his preference was wrong. I think she was having trouble taking his perspective.
- Occasionally I hear DD call a classmate by the wrong name. Recently, she's been reading her school yearbook a lot, and I wonder if she's practicing face to name mappings.
- In grade 1, DD had a group of friends that played together at recess. She led them to play a game of pretend in which she was the teacher and they were students. For weeks, she taught them facts each day about a video game that many of the kids had never played. She assigned them homework, and created report cards at home with critical comments on them, and had them in her backpack to hand to the "students" at recess. I was never present for their play, but I would be surprised if there weren't signs of disinterest from the other kids.
- She prefers to play with younger kids.
- She talks to adults as though they're peers, which can sound impolite. For example, she might say "c'mon, I'm not going to do that" to a friend's parent.

We don't see behavior like first three examples often, but the last two are common.

Sometime, I'd like to seek out a specialist in giftedness and autism in individuals that mask, for an assessment for DD. If she is Autistic, it would be nice for her to understand herself better. I also anticipate that if she is, she may struggle socially as expectations for social interactions become more complex.

2. Your suggestion that eyestrain led to reading becoming an aversive activity fits very well with what we saw during that period. And our expectation that ability to write should lead to ability to read made her aversion worse too. You make a good point that her fluency is actually above grade level.

3. I think you're right that the asynchrony between the content and delivery of her speech contributed to my perception that her pronunciation was poor for her age. Point well taken.

4. Thank you for sharing your experience with your similar DC. It's wonderful that you were able to keep DC engaged throughout grade school, and also able to build awareness of their unique ways of thinking, and teach them tools to support their executive function. I hope to do the same for my children. It's also useful to hear that a more appropriate instructional level helped alleviate some attentional challenges.

1. That's a good point about her not being quite comparable to the norm group due to immersion in a second language.

2 & 3. That makes sense that regression to the mean makes the achievement scores unsurprising.

I appreciate you pointing out the contrasts and similarities between scores that are related to each other. It isn't too surprising to me that she found it easier to remember pictures, whether that's due to more interest or stronger visual memory.

Your hypothesis about her dislike of being read to being related to us starting to read books with fewer pictures sounds very reasonable. I wish we had tried harder to read books that were more engaging to her back when she stopped wanting to read. Bringing lots of books that were interesting to her into the house was a big factor in her starting to read for fun.

4. Thank you for the advice to follow up on attention challenges. We followed up with the psych. Based on his observations during assessment, plus parent and teacher surveys, and a meeting with me, he diagnosed DD with ADHD-C.

I think it's a good idea for me to re-open the discussion about homeschool with DD. I agree that there are many opportunities for social contact when homeschooling. I like the idea of seeing if she can be involved in some school activities. DS homeschools, and it's a great way to accommodate his extreme asynchrony.

DD has some amazing strengths, including many that arise from the atypical ways she thinks and senses. I hope to support her to be aware of those differences and to appreciate their strengths, while also helping her learn tools she can use in areas where the differences cause challenges.

Thank you very much for your insight!