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.

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!

Transistion

The move has been rough on Hannah. There has been a resurgence in old behaviors and an increase in current ones. Twice she's peed in her closet (why is it always the closet by the way) not because she had to go to the bathroom, but because she was mad at me. The hitting, kicking, biting, scratching, screaming, and shouting nasty words is at an all time high. The bigger she gets, the harder that is to manage. She is just so strong! She seems to be perpetually angry and has zero impulse control when her hair trigger is activated.

Shortly after we moved in I took her to the Omaha Zoo by myself. We used to go to the Rhode Island Zoo by ourselves all the time so I thought nothing of doing it. Well, this zoo is a lot bigger than our old zoo and requires much more walking. At one point Hannah's whining reached critical mass and she just freaked out. When I suggested we call it a day and come back another time that freak out turned into a full fledged meltdown. I ended up having to drag her close to 2 miles (most of it uphill) back to the van while she screamed, hit, kicked, scratched, and bit me. Let me tell you I got plenty of dirty looks that day. Only one kindly person offered me a smile and the encouraging words of, "It looks like someone is having a rough day," the entire way! I'm actually surprised no one called security thinking I was trying to kidnap her, she was putting up such a fuss. Even though it was a crisp spring day, I was drenched in sweat by the time we reached the van. The workout I received wrestling her back to the parking lot rivaled anything I ever did while on the P90X program! Try it if you dare. It's guaranteed to melt the pounds away!

She snuck out of the house during nap time and went visiting around the neighborhood. The scary part was that she even crossed the street and was on her way up to the next street when Kyle found her! Another scary part is that two of our neighbors that she chose to go visit actually saw and spoke with her, but neither of them called us to let her know she was off wandering. Seriously, who thinks it's ok for a 4 1/2 yr old to be off on her own running the streets?!? When I went looking for her I was in a panic after having searched the house and not been able to find her. At first I thought she was hiding in the house since she's prone to doing that. The new house is much bigger than the old one and it took me much longer to search thoroughly and that wasted precious time. Our property is also much larger and very wooded, as is the whole neighborhood so she could have also been hiding nearby outside and I not been able to immediately see her. I was on the verge of calling the police when Kyle came walking up the driveway with her. He found her at the very edge of our property on her way up to the next neighborhood! After that little episode we made the tough decision to put a lock back on her door. We were hoping that we wouldn't have to do that here. She's almost five and should be able to be trusted to stay in the house. We also live in a much quieter area and I thought even if she managed to get outside she'd be ok as long as she stayed on the property. That day she proved she wouldn't just stay on the property!

Back last year when Hannah had her latest psych eval, along with her Disruptive Behavior Disorder-NOS, Pediatric Bipolar and ADHD were listed as rule out disorders to watch because she had many warning signs of both, but the teacher evaluations did not match the home evaluations. Over the last 6 months or so we've seen a marked increase in impulsive behavior. In fact the girl barely has ANY impulse control at all (for good OR bad actions). She's never really been one to learn from her mistakes and the consequences we give for her choices never seem to make any difference in future choices so we are really starting to suspect that an ADHD diagnosis may be tacked on in the not so distant future. Her birth brother also has this diagnosis so it's not too big of a surprise and the more and more I learn about ADHD and it's characteristics, the things I thought disqualified Hannah from the diagnosis don't disqualify her at all. At the moment, all attempts at behavior modification are failing and I think it's beginning to affect her self esteem. I think she's starting to FEEL as if she is a bad girl. That is something I really DO NOT WANT. I know she is a good girl. She just can't seem to help herself sometimes. All this makes me wonder if an ADHD diagnosis comes if we should consider medication. I never thought I'd ever consider it for her for pretty much any reason, but I want her to be happy and right now she's just not. She can't control her actions and I imagine that is pretty frustrating. Have any of you ever considered/used any of the ADHD medications for your children? What factors went into your decision to try/not try them? What were your family's experiences with them?

On the positive side, Hannah's academics of course continue to accelerate. Lately she's been working on the phrasing aspect of her reading fluency and has made huge leaps! She reads with barely a thought about decoding and when she does mess up phrasing she notices and goes back and rereads the section until it sounds right. Addition and subtraction of the numbers less than 10 have pretty much become automatic for her. Counting change is also pretty much automatic. I think we are going to move up to paper money and larger amounts of change (several dollars worth of change) soon. She's cruising through a first grade math textbook with ease at the moment and we haven't really hit anything she hasn't mastered yet. Her vocabulary continues to increase and makes her sound much older than she is. Combine that with the fact that she just had her well child check up and she was in the 99.7th percentile for height and we've had multiple people suggesting that she must be in 2nd or 3rd grade lately! They are always astonished when Hannah informs them she hasn't quite turned 5 yet and she'll start kindergarten in the fall. Her fine motor coordination is also improving and her handwriting has improved drastically. Her coloring is much better too although she still hates to color. She's begun mostly using upper and lower case letters properly when she writes although she'd still rather write in all upper case. She still has several number reversals that we are working on (2, 7, 5, and 9), but the numbers themselves are formed correctly. They are just facing the wrong way! That's totally age appropriate so I'm not concerned in the least. Her spelling is getting much better and she's memorized how to spell many of the unusually spelled common sight words and is beginning to learn some of the more common spelling patterns beyond CvC and vCe. She's really into writing lists and stories at the moment and has begun writing her own chapter book. Now her idea of a chapter consists of only 2 sentences, but hey it's her book!

We've met 3 families in our neighborhood/town that have children around Hannah's age and have had play dates with them all so far. Two of those families have kids that will go to the same school as Hannah so that is a huge plus. AND one little girl (who unfortunately won't go to Hannah's school, but IS starting kindergarten next fall) lives basically next door. Our property extends quite a ways up the street we live on away from our house and all the way up to directly across from her house. We are hoping for lots of play dates with her this summer. One of the other families we mentioned invited us to attend the local festival with them and also invited Hannah to join their sons' team for a jr firefighters' water fight. It was AWESOME! Hannah had a blast. She watched the parade, climbed trees with the boys, and of course participated in the water fight. The actual competition is difficult to explain so I'll have to post pictures of it instead. After the kids' competition we watched the adult firefighters do their competition. Imagine what you see the kids doing in the picture being done with fully dressed firefighters and fire hoses! It was awesome to watch.

Photo Notes: The pictures are from painting Hannah's new room. The room was originally a dark forrest green. It was very pretty and well done, but hardly a little girl's room. Hannah also had been asking for a blue room for a year so we decided to give it a try. Kyle did a great job on it and Hannah even helped with the first coat of paint. The last picture is from the water fight. I'll post more pictures from that in my next post.

Post Script

I can't believe I neglected to write about the best part of Hannah's phone adventure in my last post. When I walked into her room to find her chatting on the phone she was talking to my step dad. She had called him because she really wanted to talk to my mom, but she couldn't find her phone number in my phone book so she had called Tom to get it! Now my mom's number IS in my phone, however it isn't filed under Mamaw or her first name! Of course it's under mom, but Hannah only knows my mom as Mamaw and her first name and she couldn't find either of those in my phone. My step dad is in there under his first name and since she knows him as Papaw and his first name she thought she'd do a little problem solving and just give him a call to get Mamaw's number! The little stinker!!! Smart, but a stinker none-the-less!

The behaviour around these parts has been pretty rough the last few days. It started the instant we dropped Kyle off at the airport. My punishment for delivering Daddy to the plane was having to drag my almost five year old daughter on her stomach through the main aisle of the grocery store to check out while simultaneously dodging hits, kicks, and bites. This continued out into the parking lot and all the way to the van. Eight things, I only had eight things on my list and we HAD to get those things. We had nothing to eat in the house so I couldn't just abort the trip like I often do when things go bad-just leave the cart in the middle of the aisle and run. We couldn't even manage to buy 8 things. UGH! The night only got worse from there and I ended up putting her to bed at 5:30pm! She had lost every possible privilige for the rest of the night so there was really nothing left for her to do so she went almost willingly. She ended up reading to herself until she fell asleep. I found her with a book open on her chest and the lights still on at 8:00pm. I'm not sure when she actually fell asleep, but she looked peaceful and happy. If only I could bottle that peace for when we need it during the day!

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.

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!

Check Your Facts

Hannah had a serious crisis on Thursday. While at the library she found a book on bearded dragons. This is the same type of lizard that happens to be the class pet at her animal class at the YMCA. During the very first class they met this particular lizard (named Spice) and were told lots of interesting facts about bearded dragons, one of which was that unlike many other lizards, the bearded dragon's tail will not grown back after it falls off. WELL . . . . . upon reading that book from the library a page was found that stated that the bearded dragon's tail would indeed grow back after it had fallen off. Hannah was aghast. But her teacher had said! This conflict just would not do. So Hannah insisted on bringing the book with her to class later on that day to read the teacher the page that talked about the tails. She marched right into the room, interrupted the teacher who was still talking on her cell phone and not quite ready for class, and began leafing through the book to find the important page. She then began to read in a very authoritative tone that the bearded dragon can indeed grow its tail back. The teacher didn't quite know what to say. She appeared to be in shock although I'm not sure if it was from being called out by a 4 year old or the fact that she had just witnessed said 4 year old reading fluently from a book designed for 2nd graders! She did recover quite nicely though and managed to gracefully admit that she might possibly be wrong and that she'd check her facts and report back next week as to whether it was her or the book that had their facts mixed up. It was all I could do not to laugh out loud, but it also gave me a feeling of dread. This was probably the first of many, many instances when my little one will want to correct a teacher and if we don't start working on how to respectfully disagree with an adult now, I can see her ending up in some serious trouble!

Soccer

So. . . . . Soccer has been interesting. Hannah insists that she wants to do it, but whines pretty much the entire time during practices and games saying she's thirsty, tired, hungry, etc. I'm not sure if she likes it or not. One thing is for sure, she definitely DOES NOT get the concept of a soccer game. If the ball is near her she will kick it and she will sorta run after the ball along with the rest of the herd, but if another person is near the ball she will not kick it, nor will she try to kick the ball more than once or steal it from another player. Most of her games are spent wandering around the field not paying attention and then running when Kyle tells her she needs to run! I think she may not be quite mature enough for a competitive team sport. It has been interesting to see that for all her aggressive tendencies she shies away from using them on the field to her advantage and actually gets intimidated by the more aggressive players on the opposing team. If only karate hadn't been a bust. That might have been right up her alley, but we won't soon find out since we showed up again for the first class of the session last week only to have the instructor be a no show AGAIN! Then I found out today that the session is cancelled. I think next session (starts in November) we'll try swimming since she has really been enjoying that with Kyle and has made great strides as far as going under and propelling herself around the pool. Who knows how well she'll do in an organized class, but it's worth a shot.

Hannah has once again had a huge leap in her reading abilities and is now breezing through chapters out of chapter books. This past weekend we all camped out in our backyard and Hannah decided to get up at 4:30am. Kyle and I of course were not about to wake up that early and so Hannah picked up the only book in the tent, Stuart Little by E.B. White and began reading. I lay there and listened to her read two whole chapters. There were a few words over those two chapters that she stumbled over, but on the whole she did fantastic. Holy Cow! Stuart Little is at 3rd grade reading level if I remember correctly. I lay wide awake and stunned, unable to go to sleep for fear that I'd miss her amazing performance. Another recent obsession of hers is counting, counting for a LONG TIME. She's been able to count to 100 for a few years now, but now she can do it fast and without thinking at all so she's been constantly counting to 100 and then starting over and then over and over. The thought had never occurred to us to teach her to go past 100, but the other day Kyle asked her, "Hannah, what comes after 100?" She didn't know so he said 101 and then asked her what came next. She immediately got the pattern and now she can count absolutely as far as she wants. She hasn't made it to 1000 yet, but that's only because she usually gets tired of counting or we make her stop before she gets there!

Roller Coaster

It seems like we live on a constant roller coaster. Yesterday Hannah and I had a wonderful Mommy Daughter Day. We went to the museum, had lunch, played, did school, had dinner, bath, bed with no problems. We made it through with no screaming, melting down, hitting, kicking, etc. There was of course some minor preschool disobedience, but hey, no one's perfect. This morning, however, was a totally different story. Hannah was out of control. She threw things, hit me, kicked me, scratched me, tried to bite me, and pinched me. All this because she didn't want to turn off the TV and then later didn't want to wash up and leave for school. It's not like this routine was out of the ordinary. We do it EVERY Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We've done it for over a year. In fact, except leaving for school, we do the same routine every single morning! Still, it's impossible to predict when she'll be able to smoothly move through the morning routine successfully and when she'll just completely lose control of herself. By the time I actually got her to school she was fine and I'm sure she'll have a wonderful day there. That's the other thing that is frustrating. She almost NEVER displays these aggressive behaviors at school. For them she's a sweet angel all the time. I can almost guarantee though that the minute I walk in to pick her up the behaviors will start building and by the time we make it home they will be in full swing. UGH! How can she act so sweetly and behave so wonderfully one moment and then at the flip of a switch shift into another gear and go nuts on me? I just don't get it.

Something that interests me about Hannah's reading level is that even though she can read at a second grade level and comprehend what the text says as far as being able to report the events of the story and the facts objectively, she is unable to make predictions or inferences about the stories she reads. In this aspect of reading comprehension I would say she is just barely at age level for a 4 year old, maybe even a little behind since my expertise is not early childhood, but elementary school. Even stories that she has read to her and that she doesn't have to expend the mental energy of actually decoding, she is unable to display this higher level comprehension. Picture books she is a little better at picking up unspoken aspects of the story, but that is only because she studies the pictures so intensely. If the pictures weren't there she wouldn't gain as much depth about the story as she does. Every now and then she'll get something that I'm surprised she catches, but on the whole this uneven development she has in reading is quite fascinating to me. A four year difference between decoding and comprehension is a pretty big gap and I am amazed that it could even develop. It's hard for me to imagine being able to read the words, but not really understanding all that they tell. I've heard that this is quite common for children with hyperlexia, but I'm not too concerned yet since really she's right about where she should be comprehension wise. If it ever gets to the point where she can't comprehend at the grade level she's SUPPOSED to be reading (even if she's still reading 4 years ahead!) then I'll be worried. For now though, I'm just intrigued.

Karate

Hannah will be starting karate next weekend at our local YMCA. I don't think it's a very intense program (how can it be with 4 year olds!) so it should be a good introduction to the sport to see if she likes it. This particular session only lasts 5 weeks so if she hates it we haven't wasted too much money and she doesn't have to tough it out too long. I'm hoping that karate will give her a positive outlet for all of this aggressiveness she has, although I am aware that the opposite could be true in that it could increase her aggressive acts. Let's hope that doesn't happen. Sensory-wise, karate should be very good for her. I'm also hoping it will help a bit with impulse control.

Six or seven months ago Hannah went through a stage where she picked at toilet paper, wadded it into tiny little balls and then stuffed it various places, bodily orifices, heating vents, between her toes, cracks in the wall, etc. It's been awhile since we've had any toilet paper stuffing, but it looks like that streak might be ending. Yesterday Hannah wadded up and stuffed a HUGE amount of toilet paper down our bathroom sink drain and then filled the sink with water! Let me just tell you that soaking wet, disintegrating toilet paper is NASTY! I made her dig all the toilet paper out from around the stopper and from as far down the drain as her little fingers could reach. I wasn't about to clean that mess up! She definitely was not happy about having to clean up, but I sure wasn't happy about her little experiment either!

Lately I've been struggling to find appropriate books for Hannah to read. She's capable of reading most easy chapter books, but unfortunately most of the easier chapter books are written at a 1rst or 2nd grader interest level and not a 4 year old's interest level. There's also the problem of the characters being very sassy and rude. When I flip through a book and see the words dumb, stupid, and hate multiple times I know it's not the right book for Hannah. We have a hard enough time enforcing our rules about appropriate language and respect for others (especially adults) without having to confront negative examples in books just yet. We can tackle that later. There are a few animal stories written by Penny Dale that are perfect for her, but unfortunately those series don't seem to be carried in most bookstores or the library. The popular Animal Ark series also made a few "Little" Animal Ark books that are good for Hannah, but again they don't seem to be in libraries and bookstores and there are only a few of them. I did recently find a cute little series in the bookstore called Appleville Elementary that are early chapter books and they seem perfect for Hannah so far. The first book is about a bunch of kids getting ready for the first day of first grade. If anyone has any ideas about chapter books that are fairly easy to read and are the appropriate interest level for a 4 year old (I try to keep the main character no older than about 8 years old) I'd appreciate the help.

Yesterday I took Hannah to get her hair cut. She'd been begging to get it done for weeks. Now that we go to a kids only hair cut place (we had a VERY bad experience at a Super Cuts for her first hair cut and it made her terrified of getting it done) she loves having her hair cut. She'd go have it done weekly if I'd let her! Actually it's not the actual hair cutting that she likes. She really likes that after the cut is done they put glitter gel in her hair and while they are cutting she gets to watch a movie. I know I pay a little more for these silly little extras, but it's worth it when I see how calmly and cooperatively she behaves as opposed to that awful first cut. Last night Hannah discovered that I had cut Kyle's hair the night before. I had forgotten to get rid of the evidence piled up on the deck! She was quite interested in what she saw as this new development (I've cut Kyle's hair on and off ever since we got married, maybe even since before we were married, but Hannah's never knew that I did it) and asked if I could cut her hair. Ummm. . . . . No! I'll use the clippers to buzz Kyle's hair (although I don't even like doing that. It totally stresses me out, but I can't handle pay $20 for a cut every few weeks.), but I'm not about to touch the scissors on a wiggly 4 year old where my mistake could take months or even years to grow back. No Thank You! This curiosity of hers in my cutting of Kyle's hair has me worried given her past indiscretions with scissors and her own hair. In my mind this is a BAD sign and a really big goof up on my part. This just may undermine my standard speech I give every time she takes the scissors to herself about only people trained to cut hair can cut her hair. Pray that she somehow forgets about this and stays away from the scissors!

Photo Notes: All of the pictures except for the last one are from Hannah's birthday party. Those of you who read regularly will remember the little boy from her class, Jesse, whom Hannah said she was going to marry on multiple occasions. Well, Jesse is the boy standing with Hannah in the first picture. Doesn't he just look thrilled to have his picture taken? He's a cutie though and super sweet. We were so glad he could come to her party.

DUH!

Here's a quick Hannah story for you all. Lately Hannah has been really interested in all things related to the solar system, but especially the planets and the sun. We've been reading a lot of books about the planets and about the earth and the sun and consequently she's learned about the earth rotating on it's axis and revolving around the sun and how those two things make our days and nights and our seasons. The other day we were driving in the van and she was reading a book to herself called "Wake Up Sun." It's a cute little easy reader about some farm animals who, through a series of misperceptions, wake up in the middle of the night thinking it's daytime and that the sun has over slept. They spend the rest of the book trying to wake up the sun. Upon finishing the book (which she's read dozens of times before mind you) Hannah claps it shut rather roughly and says, (insert teenage valley girl voice here) "MOM! That is SOOOOOO silly. The farmer's baby didn't wake up the sun. It wasn't EVEN sleeping! It was just on the other side of the earth." Duh! I guess the author of "Wake Up Sun" didn't get the memo that stated that all elements of her story had to be completely and utterly scientific. Pay no attention to the fact that she wasn't bothered at all by the fact that the animals talked!

Here are some fun summer pictures for your viewing pleasure. Don't her legs look amazingly long in that swimsuit? That's why all her shorts that fit in the waist look like daisy dukes!