Report Cards

Report cards came home last week and Hannah's academics were fine of course.  We found out she's reading middle of third grade level and is right on benchmark for end of first quarter 3rd grade math.  She's in first grade!  Her work habits/social skills section on her report card wasn't quite as rosy, but it was better than I expected.  The teacher listed that she needs to work on assuming responsibility, practicing self control, and respecting the rights and property of others.  She loves writing stories and is actually pretty good at writing a coherent story with a beginning, middle, and end.  They have not sent home an evaluation that lists where her written language skills are since most of her classmates are just focusing on getting a single complete sentence down on the page that is legible and uses basic writing conventions, but I would guess she is at least middle of second grade for it. 

After the biting incident we started a trial on medication.  At first we thought we were seeing some pretty severe side effects after the first day on the meds so we stopped them after one day and called the doctor the next business day to check in.  She confirmed what we had already thought about which was that the medication SHOULD have been out of her system by the time we experienced what we thought might be the side effect so it was probably something else and simply a coincidence that it happened on the same day we started up the med trial.  We tried the meds again that next day after talking to the doctor, and after 2 consecutive days on them we have seen no serious side effects and only a little bit of appetite suppression.  We have also not seen any real improvements that can be measured, but she is on the very smallest dose possible and not even up to the normal starting dose for this particular medication.  Apparently the doctor did not even expect any results at this stage, she was just ruling out negative side effects.  I'm guessing that if things stay the same, sometime next week they will up her dosage. 

  

Hannah's Halloween costume for the year is finally finished.  Ever since she's been old enough to choose her own costume she's asked for something that was difficult (or impossible) to just go out and buy, so for the last 3 years I've had to make her costumes.  I'm not a crafty lady and I can't operate a sewing machine on my own (even though I DO have one) so this is always a difficult task.  I have to create something with as many premade parts as possible that needs a minimum amount of hand sewing to get me by.  This year she wanted to be a grey wolf.  I thought I was off the hook because surely wolf costumes existed.  Well, they do, but only for toddlers or in the form of the Big Bad Wolf or werewolves for adults.  So, I was stuck with making her costume yet again.  At least this year I was able to cheat a bit because I managed to find a winter hat that was in the shape of a wolf's head to use as the head (in years past I've had to create a head on the hood of a hooded sweatshirt).  That only left me with finding the appropriate color sweatshirt and sweatpants, stretchy gloves, and tube socks.  The only thing I had to actually sew was the tail onto the sweatpants.  It was a one afternoon job to get it all done.  That was SO MUCH easier than her Bolt or Toothless costumes that I almost wept in relief.  It's not the best wolf costume to ever come around the pike, but she likes it and that's all that matters. 

March

I have a feeling March is going to be a rough month. Kyle has already traveled out of state once and he is schedule to go out of state (and out of country) at least 3 more times this month. Hannah gets all out of sorts when he is gone and even the toddler, who I will hereby refer to as the Hurricane on this blog, seems to be affected by his absence. When he's gone I don't sleep well and that affects my patience to boot. It's a vicious cycle! We also have a 6 day weekend coming up this week. Hannah's school's "spring break" is actually 2 days off at the end of one week, the weekend, and then 2 days off at the beginning of the next week. The change in routine and the lack of structure on breaks really throws Hannah off as well. Add to that the fact that Kyle will also be gone for half of that break and we're prepping for disaster!

On a positive note, the door alarm is working. We do not believe Hannah has managed to leave her room even one time without our knowledge and that goes a LONG way to easing my fears about the medication stealing. There's still always the daytime that she could go for it, but at least I'll be awake and alert to her absence. I try not to let her out of my sight for very long at a time.

We had her latest IEP meeting and got things set up for next year. They even added some specific and measurable academic goals to ensure that she's not being allowed to simply slide by not learning since she already meets grade level standards. They identified that her reading level was at the beginning of 3rd grade level and her reading goal is to be at the beginning of 4th grade level by the end of first grade. I think that's actually a very ambitious goal since 3rd grade is where reading gets tough. You stop learning to read and start reading to learn. Comprehension and vocabulary knowledge as well as life experiences become a bigger part of reading than decoding and those are the things she sometimes struggles with. Her math goal is to be at the end of 2nd grade level by the end of the year. I actually think that is a skimpy goal since she's mastered much of 2nd grade material already. She's only doing first grade curriculum because there are a few holes in her knowledge on a select set of concepts. Her overall knowledge and computation ability is already into the 2nd grade level now. She continues to have her various social skill and behavior goals and now has OT goals as well since that was finally added to her IEP after the full evaluation the team did a few months ago. In general, I'm quite pleased with her IEP and I think it should set her up for success next year. The biggest factor will be her teacher. The wrong teacher could be her demise. This year the principal hand picked her teacher and it was a perfect fit. I HOPE they do the same thing next year.

Hannah's ability to spell and write complicated sentences has really blossomed the past month. I'm quite impressed by her progress. They do a lot of writing in her classroom and she does quite a bit in the resource room as well. Writing was one of her biggest weaknesses going into the school year and now I would say she's above grade level on it too!

Hannah continues to grow into her role as big sister. Jealously still abounds, but she did express to me the other day that she hopes the Hurricane gets to stay forever. She likes to play with him (in small doses) and he wakes her up every morning which she pretends to hate, but really loves! Working the behavior plan is tough with the Hurricane around, but somehow I'm making it work.

Never Dull

Life it seems is never dull around here. You know how you read something and you think, "Wow! That's crazy/funny," but it's only funny because it's not happening to you and you know it'd never happen to you because things like that always happen to someone else? Well, that's my life. I'M the one who those things happen to! Kyle's been gone on a business trip to Germany for the past week and the kiddos (mostly Hannah) decided to really give it to me while I was doing my single mommy gig. Before even a day had elapsed Hannah had cut her hair again! I believe this is the 7th, maybe 8th time she's done this. This time she decided to cut the bangs she had created the last time she got ahold of the scissors completely off. She has maybe an 1/8 on an inch right at the front of her forehead left. Then she got into the baby wipes and scattered them about the toddler's room for the dog to shred. Seriously, shouldn't that phase have passed when she was like 2? Next she decided to douse the cat in baby shampoo. Let me just say that the cat was both angry and humiliated. I still haven't managed to get it all rinsed out of him yet and I'm covered in scratches from the attempts. It's quite difficult to hold a cat by the scruff while also wielding the sprayer and trying to scrub the shampoo out. Finally, a few nights ago she figured out how to pick her door lock (the door alarm still isn't in yet so we HAD to switch the door knob around while I was here alone) by prying a nail out of the wall and using that to pop the lock! She did it several times one night before I finally figured out what she was doing and where the nails were coming from. Now all pictures and nails are removed from her room. It's starting to look pretty bare in there! Oh, and just to be sure I preserve everything, a few days before Kyle left Hannah was supposed to be doing a job card chore. I had to supervise the toddler so she was left alone for periods of 5 minutes at a time. After one of those 5 minute intervals I went to check on her and it was like all heck had broke loose in the basement! Paint was smeared on the walls in several places. The paint bottles themselves were coated in paint and then doused with glitter. The dollhouse roof had been repainted. The floor was covered in glitter. There was paint on the carpet. AND she had left a trap for me of a pool of paint on the bathroom floor for me to step in and track all over the place. This was actually the 2nd trap she had set for me. The first one she made a trail of Q-tips leading to behind her chair to try to fake me into thinking she was hiding behind there instead of in my bathroom getting into my body spray. I'd say I made a fatal parenting error by allowing her to read Roald Dahl's book Matilda!

In other news, the school system finally did thier full evaluation of Hannah for her IEP eligibility. The information the psychologist gave was no surprise. We already knew she is freaking brilliant. He mentioned that she has some executive function deficits, but that at the moment they really aren't much of an issue due to her age, but will most likely become more of an issue as she gets older. That was the first I had heard of executive function problems. We actually thought we had managed to dodge that bullet. I guess not. The big kicker was the OT's report. They assessed her fine motor skills, her sensory system, and her vision. I had no idea that OT's dabbled in the vision arena, but apparently they do. Her fine motor skills were perfect. No surprise there. She showed significant sensory issues. Also not surprising. What was surprising though was that the OT felt that she had some visual processing problems. She said that her two eyes do not work together correctly and that that could be the cause of some of her hyperactiveness. She also said it could cause reading problems down the road when the type gets smaller and the white space on the page lessens. She recommended she have an evaluation by a behavioral optometrist for possible vision therapy. UGH! That's all we need, more therapy. I read up on vision therapy since I'd never really heard much about it and I can't say that I'm convinced. A lot of what I've read seems a bit like voodoo science and there seems to be no real evidence to back it up. We are definitely going to have to do some thinking about that before we jump into something else. Anyone else know anything about vision therapy or had your child do it?

Finally, Wednesday we have Hannah's evaluation at the severe behavior clinic. Apparently, even if she does qualify for the program, we will be put on a waiting list for services. It could be quite awhile before treatment could begin. Sigh. . . .

Hannah seems to be settling into sisterhood well enough. She's had her moments of jealousy and still gets quite clingy, but I see her enjoying our new little one as well. Whenever something annoys her, such as crying, I try to put it into the perspective of how she used to do it when she was a baby. That seems to help a bit. She's been very curious about how she was when she was the baby's age. We've watched some old home movies of her at that age and then compared the two of them. Boy was that a shock. She wasn't nearly as physically competent, but boy was she a lot more verbal!

Photo Notes: All of these pictures are from December. We've got swim lessons, Christmas, and working in the shop with Pap.

Tooth Fairy

The tooth fairy finally made her first visit to our house last week. During our trip back to Indiana for Kevin's wedding we noticed that Hannah's permanent tooth had begun coming in behind her baby tooth. We were worried there would be a big gap in her mouth for all the wedding pictures, but that baby tooth held on. It finally agreed to come out one night last week and boy was Hannah excited about the impending visit from the tooth fairy. I bet she checked on her tooth a dozen times after she placed it under her pillow. The tooth fairy left her a shiny new half dollar and she was pleased as punch. A few days before it finally fell out we noticed that the tooth next door to it was also already coming through and it didn't seem loose at all. Now it seems to be at least a little bit loose so I'm not going to get too worried about it yet unless that adult tooth starts to get big and we haven't made any progress in getting the baby tooth out. Tiffany, Hannah's birthmom, said that the twins' teeth did the same thing and they never had to have any of them pulled so that is an encouraging sign. This must just be a genetic thing that runs in her family.

We had our homestudy visit this week and it went very well. We were disappointed to learn, however, that it would be after the first of the year before our finger prints were cleared and our homestudy finalized. Hannah was actually mad about it. She shouted at me, "I want kids NOW!" I couldn't help but think, "My thoughts exactly!" It is a bit frustrating to just sit and wait on the government red tape when we know via our social worker that they are really struggling to find homes to place children in in our area right now. We are ready and willing, but can't take a placement until the government takes it sweet time to process our finger prints. UGH!

Hannah continues to do well in school. Her teachers are really good about staying on top of her behaviors and she's getting plenty of academic challenge. Yesterday I actually just got an email from her teacher to let me know that Hannah had tested out of all of the sight word lists to meet the benchmarks for the entire school! This means that for the next 3 years she won't ever need to be assessed on them again because she passed the kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and third grade tests! Way to go Hannah! We weren't really surprised since when the lists came home to practice Hannah didn't have to practice. She said every single word correctly the first time on all 30 lists. Still, it's good to know that she's displaying her knowledge at school as well as at home since that hasn't always been the case with her. In math she continues to get faster and faster at adding and subtracting and has also been working on word problems where she has to decide whether or not she needs to add or subtract to get the answer. She also likes to find the missing sign in equations. Her spelling and writing continues to improve and I'm often blown away by the number of words she just "knows" how to spell without having to sound them out. She can also spell many of the sight words that you can't sound out. Her comprehension skill of retelling a story is also improving. At the beginning of the year she was not only below her actual reading level of 3rd grade in this skill, but she was actually below her grade level on it. Now she's above grade level on retelling, but not quite up to her current reading level yet. We'll keep working on it.

Testing

Before Hannah's IEP meeting, the resource room teacher performed some assessments on her to determine her level of academic functioning in reading. The classroom teacher also performed the kindergarten benchmark tests that all students take at the beginning of the year. While we weren't exactly surprised with the results of the assessments, it's something altogether different to see the numbers right there on paper in front of you. Hannah is indeed reading at a beginning of 3rd grade level. She even comprehends at that level as far as answering factual questions. Her weakness lies in making predictions, relating what she reads to her experiences appropriately, and most of all in retelling. It appears that it doesn't matter how difficult the text is (first, second, or third grade level) she has the same problems with retelling the story in her own words. I wasn't surprised at all to hear that. I've noticed that myself when reading with Hannah. I'm not sure if it's truly a problem of comprehension, a lack of interest in the task, or not paying attention to what she's reading. After her IEP meeting I read with her at bedtime that night and I had her do some retelling of two easy readers and two chapters out of different chapter books and I noticed a very clear pattern. In the books where the topic or story was of interest to her she could recall the story perfectly and gave plenty of details to create a complete retelling. In the other two books where she had either little interest or little personal experience with the topic she was unable to tell much at all in her retelling. I wonder if this comprehension problem is simply a matter of age, immaturity, or lack of varied life experiences due to her young age. Time will tell on that I guess.

In both reading and math Hannah exceeded all but one of the end of the year kindergarten benchmarks during the first week of the school year! Once again not surprising, but it was definitely an eye opener for her teachers to see that they truly had a kid that they were going to have to think out of the box to academically challenge. On one benchmark, instead of exceeding the required score she met it exactly. Not bad if I do say so myself for the first week of kindergarten!

Yesterday Hannah brought home a coloring page that had the standard Name____________ Date__________ heading at the top. On the line next to Name she of course wrote Hannah. On the line next to date however she had written Jadin with a backwards J (should be spelled Jayden, but I would say she did a fantastic job of sounding out a word she'd never seen written before). When I questioned her as to why she had put Jayden's name on the Date line she informed me that she wrote Jayden because that's who she likes to go on dates with! I about died. It was all I could do to keep from busting out laughing. Jayden is the son of one of our friends from Indiana who recently just moved into town as well (small world huh?) and whom Hannah has a HUGE crush on. Why oh why I wonder is it always the older boys? Jayden is 7 and in second grade (although Hannah is exactly the same height as he is!).

In other, non Hannah related news, we are settling in well here in Nebraska and beginning to make friends and develop a good support system. We've found 2 (actually 3 now that our friends from Indiana have moved to town since they also have a teenage daughter) teenage girls to babysit and both have done a good job with Hannah. One of them actually happens to be the daughter of Hannah's kindergarten teacher! I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not, but Hannah loves her so I guess we'll ride that wave as long as we can! We've completed our foster care training classes and most of our paperwork. Now we're in the waiting phase until more paperwork is sent to us so that we can be finger printed and get health checks and such. We are slowly getting the spare bedroom set up for foster children and have even bought a really cool crib. Now that drop sided cribs are banned I worried what on earth I was going to do with a stationary sided crib. My arms are too short to reach down to the mattress on those cribs on even the highest settings. Well, I found this crib on craigslist that wasn't part of any of the recalls that has a fold down gate of sorts instead. It's called a safety gate and they are really high end cribs only made by one company called Baby's Dream. Click on the link to see the crib we got. The picture is of the same model, but a different finish. I'm IN LOVE with this crib and now this company. You should really check out their site. Their furniture is so thoughtfully designed. It's hard to believe that no one else has bothered to make baby furniture this safe or well made. Oh, and by the way, no I was not paid at all to gush about the company. We simply stumbled onto them via craigslist.

We've also been busy hosting guests and installing an invisible fence for Sally the Wonder Dog. Sally isn't sure what she thinks about the fence yet (it's only been operational for 4 days so far), but I'm fairly confident it will make her life happier and our lives easier.

Photo Notes: The pictures are of Hannah and my mom celebrating their belated birthdays together when my mom and stepdad visited in the middle of August. Hannah was THRILLED to have an excuse to make and eat cupcakes!

Moving News

Boy oh boy! I have been really bad about posting. I have LOTS of updating to do. First off, our house is officially for sale. We've had one showing and an open house that brought in 4 couples, but so far no takers. With the real estate market the way it is we are really worried that we won't be able to sell our house for what we have left on the mortgage. Things have tanked that badly here in Rhode Island as far as home prices go. We aren't even attempting to get what we paid for the house. We simply don't want to have to do a short sale! On the flip side, we are benefiting from the depressed market in terms of buying a new house in Nebraska. We found an AWESOME house and are so excited to move in. So far things are going along swimmingly on that part. All we have left to do is get an appraisal (which should be a piece of cake since the sellers are actually losing almost $100,000 on their house because they HAVE to sell and it's been on the market for 2 yrs) and a termite inspection done. All the other inspections have come back fine. Kyle is already in Nebraska so it's just Hannah and I holding down the fort here in Rhode Island and that has been tough on both of us. Hannah really misses her daddy and it totally shows in her behaviour. Lots and lots of meltdown and sneakiness. She's also back to having accidents at night. More laundry is totally not what we need while trying to keep a house show ready every single day. UGH!

Hannah's most recent stunt was sneaking my cell phone into her room and making about 45 calls! She came into my bedroom during her nap time to "give me a hug" or so she said. I took the hug and then sent her back to her room telling her that rest time wasn't over yet. She went back without a fight which was in itself unusual, but I didn't think too much about it because I was really tired. Then, when nap time was over she came back into my room and said, "Mommy, nap time is over, but I'm still really tired. Can I sleep until 5:00?" Then she marched back into her room. I was in a bit of a daze having just woken up, but when I sat up and my head cleared the warning bells started going off. Never has my daughter EVER ASKED to go to sleep. I immediately burst into her room to find her chatting away on my cell phone! She quickly snapped the phone shut and prepared to chuck it across the room, but I nabbed it before she could. A study of my recent calls list showed that she had made 45 different calls and had either left messages or had conversations with many different people! The crazy thing is that she's never been showed how to use a cell phone or how to look people up in the address book. I guess that's one of the down sides of having a 4 yr old that can read and is way smarter than I am. She can figure stuff like this out and totally knew exactly who she was calling each time. These most definitely weren't random calls! UGH! The little stinker.

Palindromes

palindrome: a word or phrase spelled the same way forward and backward EX: mom, race car, did

For years we have worked with Hannah to teach her how to engage another person to play (both someone she knows and new people in public, like at a park or play place). One of the biggest skills we have worked on is introducing herself and asking others what their name is in return. Lately we had seen a bit of progress in this area if we remembered to prompt her before going into a social situation. Tonight however, without any prompting, I heard this coming from the bowls of the Mc Donald's play place structure, "My name is Hannah with a 'h' at the end and the beginning. You spell it 'H-A-N-N-A-H.' It's the same forward and backwards. You call that a palindrome." If that's not progress then I don't know what is. Maybe it's not the most socially accepted way for 4 year olds to make an introduction, but it's technically sound. I couldn't have been more proud. I was also pretty tickled at the other little boy's response (as were his parents as indicated by the gut busting laughter erupting from their table across the room!). "Uh, um, well. . . . . MY name is Steven and I can spell my name TOO.' S-T-E-V-E-N' I don' t have any domes in my name though. They are all pointy letters." Oh my goodness! Out of the mouth of babes! Hannah then tried to give another explanation about what palindromes were, listing several other words as examples, but since he couldn't spell it pretty much fell on deaf ears. She eventually got frustrated with him and said, "Let's just go play! You don't get it."

For the last several months Hannah has been obsessed with time. She has desperately wanted a watch, but Kyle told her he would not get her one until she was able to tell time independently. She has worked diligently on learning to read a clock ever since and finally was awarded with the coveted watch this weekend. We are now updated with the time approximately every 5 minutes! I'm sure the novelty will wear off soon, but for the moment the constant time reminder is a bit annoying! She's actually gotten quite good at telling time to the 5 minute interval. The only time she gets a bit stumped is when it's close to the half hour. For some reason then, and only then, does she choose to say the next hour instead of the current hour. If it's almost to the next hour she'll remember to say the current hour, but at the half hour mark when the hour hand is half way in between the two numbers it trips her up. I'd say that's still pretty good for a 4 year old though. I had 2nd graders that couldn't tell time as well as she does!

At the moment Hannah has something going on that puzzles the heck out of me. I've tried and tried to come up with a reason for this new behavior, but I just can't. You see, she's started stealing food. It started with sneaking sweets. That I could understand I guess. There isn't the old saying about getting caught with your hand in the cookie jar for nothing. What kid doesn't want to gorge themselves with sweets. But even after it became a major issue and we removed all sweets from the house and made them only a special privilege when we are out the food sneaking remained. Now she's sneaking snack type food-cheese sticks, granola, gold fish. I just don't get it. She gets 3 meals a day and at least 2 snacks. She's allowed to eat as much as she wants at each sitting. We don't allow her to free graze all day because we want her to be hungry at meal times as that has sometimes been a problem, but we rarely deny her a healthy snack if it's a reasonable distance away from the next mealtime. She knows all she has to do is ask for a snack and she will either get it or be told that dinner is within the half hour. So why the food sneaking? She's never gone without. Never had food with held. I just don't get it. Today it was crazy. It was less than an hour until dinner time and she was watching a movie and I was in the office doing bills. I heard a strange sound and went to investigate. I found her in the fridge with her hand in the cheese drawer. I told her that she needed to ask before she got a snack and that dinner would be very soon and she could have a cheese stick with her dinner, but not right now. She was angry, but not hysterical. I sent her back downstairs, or so I thought she went back downstairs, and I went back to the office. Seconds later I hear sounds in the kitchen again and when I went in to investigate there was Hannah holding a cheese stick in her hand! It's really getting bad. It's become almost a daily occurrence, probably 5 times a week at least. She knows it's against the rules to get the snacks between snack and mealtimes and she'll attempt to hide them and lie about them if she is discovered. I just don't get it. Is this a typical developmental stage for a 4 year old or is this something I need to be worried about? She's a healthy weight, growing normally, seems to have plenty of energy. I can't find a physical reason why she would NEED the extra food. I'm positive I'm feeding her plenty.

We've started a new session of classes at the YMCA and this time Hannah's doing a mommy and me cooking class, swimming, and karate. Yes, we finally managed to get into a karate class and not have it canceled! She's the only girl in the class and the oldest by at least a year I would guess. She actually has pretty good skills as far as beginning karate goes and definitely when compared to the rest of the class, but the one place she is lacking is concentration and attention. She loses interest and focus VERY easily in the class and is soon off doing her own thing. She has by far the worst focus in the entire class. You would think these little boys would be all over the place doing pretend karate chops and such, but they are not. They have rapt attention on the sensei, but not Hannah. She's off in her own little world spinning or doing poses! :) I'm thinking karate may not be in our future next session! The sport she really seems to be excelling in is swimming although attention is a problem in that class too. BUT she LOVES swimming and is a natural at it so it makes things go a little more smoothly. One problem with swimming however is that she thinks that she is better than she is and that she already knows how to do things before the instructor explains them so she doesn't listen to her directions and that gets her in trouble. We're just going to have to keep working on those listening ears and obedience to adults. She also really enjoys her cooking class. I must admit it's quite fun. So far they've only made a salad and a fruit pizza, but she's got to measure, mix, and chop and to her that's the best. She even has an excuse to wear her apron!

Tomorrow we go to visit the small private school we are considering sending Hannah to next year for kindergarten. Unless after this visit my opinion changes drastically, we feel that this is probably our best option for her for next year at least. She'll be spending time visiting and participating in the kindergarten classroom and the first grade classroom so we can determine exactly where she'll fit best. Right now the options we are considering are the kindergarten room with a drastically modified curriculum, the first grade room with a slightly modified curriculum, or beginning in the kindergarten room right now for the remaining months of the school year and then going on to the first grade room next year. The biggest challenge with Hannah is that she is all over the map as far as development goes. As it stands now she has an independent reading level of about 2nd grade, an instructional reading level of 3rd grade, comprehension of about second semester 2nd grade, math at first grade level, and social skills at kindergarten level, spelling at first grade level, and oral language at 2nd grade level, and fine motor at kindergarten. Another problem is that while these are the levels that she is currently at, she doesn't progress at one grade level a year. She learns and masters things much more quickly than the typical child so while she may be at first grade level in math right now, by the end of May she may very well be at 2nd grade level. All this makes it extremely hard to decide where to place her in an academic environment. Do you place her with her agemates because that's where her social skills lie and allow her to go years without learning anything at all? Do you choose a skill and place her with her academic peers in that particular skill and allow her to be bored with the rote repetition of the other skills? Or do we simply pick a room and pray that small class sizes and an accommodating teacher will create a curriculum just for her? UGH! Wish us luck that the visit goes well and that it sheds some light as to where the best place to put Hannah next year is.

Photo Notes: I finally got around to posting pictures from our Thanksgiving trip back to Ohio and Indiana. The first two pictures are from while we were at my parents house. Hannah loved that little kitten fiercely! She hardly ever put it down. The next three pictures are from Kyle's dad's place. She had a blast roasting marshmallows with Pap. The final 5 pictures are from our visit with Hannah's birthfamily. The first one is her birth uncle, then her birthmom Tiffany, and finally the last few are with her brother and sister Chase and Kayla. It's amazing how much they look like each other even though they are only half siblings!

A Leader---Or Just Bossy

Lately Hannah's been coming out of her shell a bit socially, at least with kids she knows pretty well. With this new found social interest has come another set of problems for my little girl. As she plays with her friends she MUST be in control of the entire situation. She orders around her playmates with the force of a drill instructor. "You go there! No! No playing with the blocks! We are playing tag. Here's the plan. You go over there and wait for me until I get there. Then I'll tell you what to do next." Sometimes the kids just go along with it. For example, at the library this week she had a whole posse following her around the children's library obeying her every command. It was actually quite impressive to watch, if not a little disturbing. Other times the children come complaining to the adults that Hannah won't let someone else play, or won't let them choose what they want to do, or that she is simply being too bossy. I worry that if she keeps this up then some of the kids she loves to play with will no longer want to play with her. In fact, I've seen that in certain situations already although the kids have always given her another chance on a different day.

I feel like it's such a fine line to walk to decide how best to handle this. I don't want to squelch any leadership potential she has, but at the same time I don't want her to alienate herself from the other kids just when she finally seems able to make friends. The problem is that she has a very limited ability to put herself in someone else's shoes. She can't transfer how she feels when she is excluded or forced to do something she doesn't want to do to how other children might feel when she does the same thing. We talk about it over and over again, but it doesn't seem to be sinking in. What I wish would happen is for another child to stand up to her in a firm yet gentle way and basically put her in her place without completely breaking her spirit.

In case you hadn't guessed it, Hannah is back home and I'm very happy about that. It's been a bit of a bumpy road reintegrating into the routine of home life for her though. We've been seeing a lot of aggression and pushing of boundaries. I'm sure the fact that Christmas is coming isn't helping in that respect! The hardest time we've been having is my nemesis, tooth brushing and washing up. Getting ready to go in the morning and getting ready for bed at night have simply been a nightmare since she's been back. It's where we've experienced most of our aggression and almost all of our meltdowns. So far I'm not seeing much to cheer about with 123 Magic. Kyle still thinks its making a difference, but I'm much harder to convince. He's not been the one who has been being scratched, hit, and kicked!

We did learn a surprising new fact about Hannah though. She can do simple addition problems (sums under 10) in her head now and has many of them memorized. She's also begun doing some subtraction and division in her head as well! She really does amaze me sometimes with the things she just spouts off that I had no idea she knew. Lately she's been very curious about words and their meanings. She asks me about dozens of words a day- some are words I've said or words she's heard on TV, others are words we read in books. Later she likes to try out her new words in novel ways. Sometimes she's successful in using them correctly, but more often I get to have a nice private laugh at some of the sentences she comes up with! :)

And the Results Are . . . . . .

Sorry it has taken me so long to post the results of Hannah's evaluations, but I've been in the midst of processing all that we learned-that and we traveled to Indiana for 9 days. Basically what we found out was that Hannah does not have enough clinical diagnostic criteria to receive a diagnosis of Asperger's anymore. She has simply grown out of it. She apparently still has many aspie traits and is "quirky", but not quirky enough to be technically on the spectrum anymore. Maybe I need to change the name of my blog again. Too bad. I really liked the title M came up with. I may just keep it anyway. She also does not have enough diagnostic criteria for ADHD or Bipolar, but she has too many red flags for each of them to rule either of them out at this point. Those two are on a watch and see status at the moment. She'll be reevaluated for them in a few years (or sooner if we have new issues crop up). Her behaviors are, however, abnormal. They are abnormal in intensity, frequency, and duration. They are abnormal enough they warrant a diagnosis, but don't fit any particular diagnosis. Therefore she gets Disruptive Behavior Disorder-NOS (not otherwise specified). You have to love that NOS catch all moniker. It was recommend that we work with a behavioural therapist to get her negative behaviours under control and to help teach her how to manage her strong emotions. The psychologist specifically mentioned that we should try 123 Magic (and The Active Alert Child) as a starting point while we are waiting to get in with a therapist. We've bought the book and implemented phase 1 of their program. Kyle thinks it is helping. I'm still up in the air about it. After all of our failures with other methods I can't help but be critical until proven otherwise. So, none of this that the psychologist told us surprised us too much, until she got to the final portion of Hannah's evaluations-the IQ test. Here's where we were in for the shock of our lives. Now, we knew Hannah was smart. We knew she was academically gifted in reading and had extremely precocious verbal language skills. What we did not anticipate was that Hannah would test as profoundly gifted, into the highest level of giftedness possible, that she would score higher than 99.7% of the population on her test! That threw us for a loop. How do we even process that kind of intelligence? We knew our local public school wasn't going to be right for her, but now we have to wonder if any of the private schools will be able to accommodate her long term even. The only gifted school even close to us is well over an hour away and charges over $25,000 a year for Kindergarten! We obviously don't have that kind of money. According to the psychologist, Hannah's extreme intelligence is currently working against her instead of for her with regards to her behavior. The Disruptive Behavior Disorder-NOS and her IQ have melded together to create the perfect storm. So, we are feeling out our options and having to learn an entirely new path. Anyone who has been down this road before us is encouraged to comment and help me out. Lord knows I could use the help.

Photo Notes: The first two photos are of Hannah trying out Daddy's mountain biking gear in the back seat of the car. It's one of her favorite car trip activities! The last photo is of her being silly while I tried to take a serious picture of her painting. She was concentrating so hard I wanted to capture the moment, but she has a tendency to get wild when the camera comes out so we have very few serious photos!