Polar bear... Maybe I missed it. What was the one thing you were making us wait to read?
OOPS!!! I forgot to mention it… after all that rambling *blush*. Thanks for the reminder
Sooo… what I made you wait to read was… after all that went on with ds and having to wait until he was almost in 3rd grade (and so full of anxiety he was scared out of his wits)…. the thing was.. we'd had the basic info we needed before kindergarten but no one thought to flag it as a potential issue. DS was tested for entry into our district's HG magnet, and his ability testing and "math achievement" (WJ-III) were all high enough, but his "reading achievement" (WJ-III) was only at 60th percentile. We (parents) thought nothing of it because we'd never tried to "teach" him to read. The school thought he'd just catch up on that part of the test if he was retested the next year. I no longer have those test results, but I suspect the low score was related to fluency, because the tester told us that we could have him tested privately but to be sure to stay away from any timed assessment - so she'd apparently noticed he was slow with some type of task. Since he didn't qualify via the school we took him in for a private IQ test with a psych who tests lots of kids for entry into the program (Kindy-age kids). On that testing, he had the classic dip in processing speed (timed, handwriting) task. The psych who tested him thought he was just slow because he didn't understand that it was important to try to move fast when being timed. I had absolutely no clue that the relatively low score in processing speed meant anything at all, but that dip was a key indicator in ds' later neuropsych testing.
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.
polarbear
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.
Which brings me to the last "ah-ha" moment. Back up there somewhere I think I mentioned dh's family includes several dyslexic people. Guess what? We didn't know that until long *after* ds was diagnosed - because no one talked about it. I also suspect dh's dad had some type of expressive language disorder because he was known for never talking. When I met him, he was quite elderly, so I thought the "not talking" was just not being interested, but once we found out about ds' challenges with getting his thoughts out, it made me very sad to think that dh's dad might have been stuck not *able* to communicate throughout his life.
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.
