Tenacious!

There is A LOT going on with this kid right now. He is holding up remarkably well and I kind of wish I could push a pause button on his life right now. Not have to send him to school or anything else. First it all started when we went to the dentist in July and they told us he needed to start braces. He just has them on the top six or so teeth but they hurt a lot and he tells us all the time that he thinks they are crushing his other teeth. He will probably have them on for a year. This is phase one. I guess he will have to go through phase two in a couple of years. He actually seemed excited about getting them on until they were on. I believe it was day two and he asked if we could take them off. Hopefully he won't try that one himself. Braces are expensive. We do have good insurance for this but it's still a lot and coordinating all the appointments is getting crazy.

Then comes part two. H has struggled with reading and writing for years. Years of him going to reading specialists, tutors, talking to anyone who would listen. I have had monthly meetings at his school with his teachers to see how he is doing. They would always say he was one of their hardest workers in the class. He was always very attentive and you could tell he really, really wanted to learn. Then test time would come and the information just didn't seem to make it's way to the paper fast enough or in handwriting that anyone could really read. It's been hard on him. It's been hard on all of us. Every night homework is a bear and I spend most of my time with H trying to get it done while C and big T are left to pretty much do their homework on their own. From the hours of 4-7p it is very tense in our house. So.... I was talking to my visiting teacher about a month ago about this. Saying I was nervous for H to be in 4th grade where things would get harder and harder. She listened and said she would pray for us. About two weeks later she stopped me in the hall at church and mentioned that she was talking to a neighbor. The neighbor had said that her daughter had a hard time with reading and tracking while she was reading and now she is going to a vision therapist and it's helping. A light bulb went on in my head. Tracking is something I knew the specialist were trying to help H do. I got on line that day and started looking up vision therapists in my area. I got to this one doctor's website and started reading. I started to cry. They were describing my H in every way. I knew I had found the right place. Insurance was the next hoop to jump through. The doc doesn't take insurance but through some persistence, I got our insurance to put this doc in our network since H will need to go once a week. We had our first meeting with the doc and he evaluated H for two hours. Within the first 10 minutes, he turned and looked at us and asked "did you know your son sees double?" Did you know he is in a lot of pain when he tries to focus things on regular basis? All I could say was "no...I had no idea" It's kind of hard to explain everything but he said our eye muscles are the last muscles to develop. If you have any developmental delay in any other muscle areas, then the eye muscles that help bring the picture into one picture and not two, doesn't develop and you end up seeing double. He showed us through a couple of weird exercises that H has some reflexes that should have gone away many years ago and that is why his eye muscles have been slow to strengthen and develop. The more he talked, the more every little quirk about H made sense. I mean EVERY LITTLE QUIRK MADE SENSE. He would ask us if we knew why H wanted to stand up while he did his homework and then would proceed to tell us why. It was like seeing my nine year old son through totally different eyes. I have bad eye sight. I know how frustrated I feel when my contacts aren't working well. I can only imagine how he has felt for all these years when he can't explain why the letters always look double and blurry no matter what he does with his glasses. It explains a lot about why h has always been my more hot tempered one. Why he seems to bounce off the walls at times. They told us kids with this issue tend to keep moving because if they stop, they notice even more that things are double. Well, now we go to the therapy once a week. We have vision homework four days a week. H got bifocals to help his eyes retrain to focus close and far away. Soon I will have a meeting with all the teachers to explain what they can do to help H excel even with these issues. When people have found out all they do is shake their heads and say "I can't believe he has done so well for so long with this." Even with this he is mostly an A/B student. A friend of mine once watched H trying to learn something new. She had been watching him for a while. He was learning how to do a back flip. Some other kids were learning at the same time but only H really stuck with it that day. He was relentless. She said "Man that kid is tenacious!" Yes...my H is very tenacious!