Always Hoping
New Member
Please let me know if I need to add anything to my siggy (within reason, I'm a bit nervous about this being open to the public). I'm a homeschooling mom and you can see my kids status in my siggy. We got the diagnosis around October so we're still learning, trying to deal with all this. We knew there was something going on with him when I homeschooled difficult child in Kindergarten (he's in second grade this year, he doesn't turn 7 until the end of the week actually). I made sure to tailor our curriculum to where he was intellectually and to spend an age appropriate amount of time on schooling stuff, but it was still more of a battle than it should've been. We put him in public school last year for a whole host of reasons that had nothing to do with him, but it was a good lesson for us. By September (school starts in Aug here) his teacher was talking about getting him evaluated. We took him to a child psychiatric in Oct. and based off of a parent survey and an office visit was diagnosis ADHD/ODD with adhd being the primary diagnosis and odd slightly behind it. The school year was awful. The medications helped, but we still got notes sent home about once a week. He was way ahead of the curriculum and very bored, but they weren't willing to do anything about it. I'm homeschooling again this year and will not go back to public school for a long time. I've been doing some research on adhd gifted children and came across a lot of info that describes my difficult child to a T. I'm going to ask his psychiatric about getting him tested, but I have another contact I may use if his psychiatric isn't very cooperative (I have no reason for thinking he won't be, just a back up plan). From everything that I'm reading and observing in him, I really think there's a big gap between his intellectual age level, his emotional age level and his physical age level and I think it's causing all kinds of havoc. Like my brother said "he's 6 going on 26". He's an absolutely wonderful child, but it's really difficult parenting him sometimes. I've got more to post about the specific difficulties, but I'll leave that for a new post. husband and I are going through Calm Parenting's cd's right now (they deal specifically with "strong willed" children) and they are a huge help, but there's a bit of a disconnect between hearing and knowing and doing. The cd's are still relatively new so I just need to keep listening to them more. I went to several of their workshops when they were local and was just floored by what he had to say. Anyway, I'm hoping to get some help and encouragement here. The encouragement is a big issue for me right now (which I'll post about next chance I get, youngest easy child needs to wake up from a nap).