Hello, everyone. After looking around for quite a while I have decided to join. I'm not sure exactly what I'm looking for, other than someone who understands. We have not had any testing or formal identification for my daughter, and people who have never met her have implied to me that I am projecting my wishes for a gifted child on her. One school director, when I read through the curriculum and asked what they would do with a 3 year old who could do all of the things they had listed for kindergarteners, actually looked at me very condescendingly and asked me how important it was to me for my daughter to be intelligent. Meanwhile, at the school we decided to send her to (NOT that one), my nearly 4 year old scored higher than all the kindergarteners on her pre-test for kindergarten readiness. The only thing on the test she didn't know yet was 3D shapes. However, she can read on a 1st grade level (we think, she doesn't like to read in front of us because she says it's not "perfect" yet), can add and subtract in her head, counts over 200, writes and spells, can recognize numbers up to 185 (that's the longest book we've read together so far, she may be able to go farther), discuss God and giving to the poor with our minister, "double" numbers without counting, and talk your ears off about animals that are diurnal or noctornal, or herbivores/carnivores/omnivores. The other night we read the first chapter of Alice Through The Looking Glass and now she has decided "mirror words" are more interesting than regular ones, so she likes to spell things backwards.
But she has the intensity, too. She's always felt so much empathy. When she was 2.5 she saw a commercial with a basset hound and cried for half an hour because he looked so sad. Then she tried to think of all the situations that could have made him sad and ways she could fix them. It turns into anxiety - hence, the not enjoying reading because it's not perfect. Often when she is disciplined she realizes later what she did that was "wrong" and becomes very upset that she's a "bad kid" because of it.
It's sensory stuff too - she is very particular about lights and sounds and tastes/textures. And has a nose like a hound dog - if you walk in the room with gum in your pocketbook she knows it instantly and can tell you what flavor it is. And there are some quirky repetitive things. She licks her hands when she's nervous or concentrating, because she says wet hands help her to calm down. When she's upset she likes to rub my ponytail on her face (thus there was a meltdown when I cut my hair short - now she's accepted it, finally, and just rubs her face against my hair). And when she gets overwhelmed by emotion she just wants to squeeze and bite because she can't figure out what else to do, but she feels like she needs to do something. The meltdowns are humongous. The other weekend it took her 3 hours to calm down because she didn't want to shower and we told her she had to. She keeps wanting to negotiate and explain to us why her ideas are better than ours.
A good friend has a daughter with Asperger's, and thinks mine has it too. I don't know, she's probably somewhere on the spectrum, but she does well socially. Well, she has lots of friends, but she doesn't understand why they are sometimes mean, and she wants to talk through the social dynamics because they don't make sense to her. She will say, "Mommy, if she was mad at me why didn't she say she was mad? She said she's not my friend, but she kept playing with me, so I think she is my friend. Why did she lie?"
I'm so exhausted already of trying to advocate for her with schools. Where she is now is wonderful, but if she does preK another year she's going to be so bored - she's already the youngest kid and getting "accelerated work" - but getting her into school a year early is so ify. She would have to be tested and then even if she scores the required 98%ile, the principal has the discretion to say whether he wants to keep her anytime up to the 45th day of school. I don't know if she could handle being rejected after school has already started.
I don't know what I'm asking or if I'm asking anything. I guess I just need to know that someone out there knows what we're going through. I'm scared about her anxiety level, I'm worried she and I will have to spend the next 14 years, at least, advocating for her, and I have no one to talk to about it because the other moms I spend time with tend to think I'm bragging.
I'm not alone, right?
