I have two boys, ages 10 and 5. My 10 year old has always had "quirks" but they were easily explained away by his doctor since he had numerous health issues in his first 2 years (and I had never held a baby until I had him, let alone be around children). We knew he was a really smart kid, and he is a voracious reader. I'm an extremely fast reader, and he is quickly surpassing me at this point, but we didn't realize that he had a LD as well. I pulled him out of school because he was bored, getting perfect grades, maintaining Principal's Honor Roll status, and my latest favorite, amazing STAR testing scores. He sounds fantastic on paper, but I view his public school success as failure because he wasn't challenged. There was always a few naggling things though. Even though he had near perfect STAR scores in many different subjects, he was only scoring in the 60th percentile in math which is almost a 40% gap between his high and low scores, couldn't retain math facts, tell time accurately, and I swear you could hear crickets chirping when he was trying to tell time. He also has great difficulty regulating emotions, doesn't make eye contact with people for a few minutes when initially meeting them (he's fine after a few minutes though), has extremely specific interests (octopi, whirlpools namely maelstroms, and Star Wars), is extremely anxious, and is the most rigid person I have ever met in terms of routine. He's developed phobias as well, which was of great concern because he wasn't willing to go outside if he saw flying insects (he's been stung twice). He also has great sensitivity to loud, and unpredictable sounds.
We took him to a pediatric developmentalist who diagnosed him as NLD. I feel horrible that I didn't notice this sooner, but the symptoms were always easily explained by his doctors so at 10 years old we are being thrust into 2E. It only took me a week of having him home to realize that things just weren't right, and we have been on this wild ride ever since. There is an amazing amount of guilt over his birth, as we have heard that this could be a result of his extremely traumatic birth which resulted in a resuscitation right after birth since his chord was wrapped around his neck and he was stuck in my pelvis. It was traumatizing for me as well, and took me years to heal and now it's come flooding back tenfold.
At the urging of our Dev. Ped. we had an educational assessment done, and found that he hit the ceiling in a couple areas of his test (verbal), and hit the floor on a couple of sections which confirmed the NLD diagnosis. I took both assessments to our charter school, and demanded an IEP assessment and we are in the midst of it (OT, Psych., SP, Resource, etc.). I recently realized that he also stims, and has a facial tick which I had been watching as it seems to be a recent devlopment. I didn't mention the stimming to the Developmentalist because I didn't know it wasn't typical, and she didn't pick up on it because he does it when he's excited and happy. I mentioned it to the OT the other day, and she is keeping an eye on it during assessments but also feels it could be cause for concern. It could be an NLD thing, or it could be a dual diagnosis. The speech therapist is actually the one that is treating my younger son with some articulation difficulties, so I was able to have a very lengthy conversation with her to familiarize herself with Tyler. She's met him, but he doesn't interact with her yet. She is going to start his assessment on Monday, after my little guy's appt.
Some days I'm ok, some days I just want to crawl in a cave and make it go away. This is my sweet little man who has always struggled through no fault of his own. I've always had major guilt over accepting an induction when I knew in the back of my mind it wasn't quite time but I was showing the beginning signs of preeclampsia, and the induction went wrong. What would he be like if I had just let things happen naturally? My youngest son had a perfect natural birth, and started turning over at 2 days old, running at 8 months, reading at 3, etc. We haven't yet tested him, but he turns 6 next week and we are going to WISC test him sometime this summer. He is obviously highly gifted, and currently he is a few grade levels above his peers without much interest in learning. I have always heard that siblings typically score within 10 points of each other, and I have such mixed feelings about having him tested and seeing the results.
That was a banger of an introduction!
