Giving Thanks

There are so many people who make this journey we are on easier... I'd like to take this opportunity to tell you about those who have gone out of their way to lighten my load.


First and foremost is my husband. Even though in many ways he just doesn't get parts of our child's personality (those that come from my far-more-OE side of the family), he is a stellar support and an amazing parent. He makes learning fun - especially in history, maths, economics, and sciences, where he is able to turn the most frustrating lesson into an interesting story. He somehow, "instinctively" (read: when mommy starts throwing things and/or gives him "that look" and says she's running away) knows when I need a break and takes over. And all the while, he is there to wipe away the tears, give me hugs when I need them, make me laugh when I don't even feel like smiling, and loves me despite the insanity. Oh, and in his spare time, he "brings home the bacon."

Second is my RL friends - those who challenge me to take on a new role (thanks MaryEllen, I think - the homeschooling is great for the kidlet, but I still don't like it); and those who are there to lighten my load when needed. There are too many to mention, but I'd like to especially point out my neighbors (Roxanne, Anne, Doug) who are always ready to lend a helping hand - or two tablespoons of ginger when I need to bake but can't get to the store; Twila, for the offer to take the kidlet out to lunch, and the understanding in Sunday school; Clay for the support and pressure to be better tomorrow than I am today; and Hillary and Denise for being sympathetic ears. And all of my Facebook friends and blog followers who regularly encourage me and give me reasons to smile. 


Third is the professionals who are working together to help our family move in positive directions and who provide services for the kidlet. This year I am especially thankful for the opportunity provided to us by biology professor Emilie - because it opened my eyes a great deal about the issues we are facing with the kidlet (and we so enjoy hanging out with her family!). I'm thankful for the coaches, physicians, psychologists, and therapists who are part of our weekly routine, and who provide excellent care for the kidlet. I am thankful for the opportunity to participate in the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth , and the classes and events the kidlet can participate in to keep him engaged (he recently was asked if he liked math, and his answer was "YES!" - HOORAY!!!).

Also I would like to thank Mary St George of Gifted Online, for introducing me to the world of gifted education and all the resources that her Facebook group has opened up for me. To have such a group of individuals from around the world who are completely focused on the needs of gifted students and 2e students has been amazingly helpful and supportive. It has been so wonderful to have so many different perspectives, but yet a single focus and desire to see gifted students understood and given freedom to reach their potential. Also, I will include Deborah Mersino of Ingeniousus, and her leadership of Twitter #gtchat - what an amazing resource and so nice to find kindred spirits and tweet in real time! Thank you, thank you, thank you!


Finally, I would like to thank my FOO. My parents, John and Sherrie, for their unfailing love, support and cheerleading; my brother, John C., for his cautious but carefully thought out guidance; and my sister, Kristen, for her encouragement in the face of frustration and self-doubt. 


For those and all of you - THANK YOU! 

Another Trip to College

We took another trip to college today. Well, sorta. Our local state university has a top-ranked engineering program, and since the kidlet wants to study engineering, we thought he might enjoy a series of free engineering lectures put on by the alumni association and the engineering department. When I told him, he was excited. We haven't really studied any engineering. He's got all the sciences fairly well handled, at least on a basic level, but engineering is so far out of my personal intellectual framework that I don't feel at all confident that I can do an effective job. So the three of us - Daddy, Mommy, and Kidlet - bundled up in the car and headed out to our first engineering lecture. 


Is it safe to say, it was a success? 

DH and Kidlet listening to the lecture.

The lecture was on reducing the carbon footprint of the US military, (and it just so happens that the kidlet is currently working on creating a whole fleet of military vehicles - in his head, mind you). He was excited to see that Boeing is already working on some of his ideas. I'm imagining the "flights" of fancy he will take in the next week will involve biofuels, superconductors with flywheels, and combination fuel cells. 


In particular, it was great to have DH along to see the miraculous change that happens when the kidlet gets engaged in something. The nervous energy calms, the eyes lock in, the brain starts spinning. The same thing happened when kidlet and I went to a college biology class last spring. All the little annoying habits that made his elementary classrooms impossible for him, disappear when he is engaged in something interesting. We're working on transferring those skills to every situation, but for now it's helpful to see that it's possible. 

Halloween and OEs

Each year around this time, kids all over start thinking about candy and dreaming up ways to increase their load. The kidlet is nearing the end of his trick-or-treating days (already his friends are eschewing the idea), but this year he is still excited. If it's for the costume or the candy is unclear, but we've got 10 days to go and he's already bouncing off the walls. 


One of the challenges we face each year is making up the costume. The kidlet has never wanted to be "a firefighter" or "a crayon" - oh no no. Those might be easy. One year he was an Arcadian Beast (I didn't have a sewing machine, so the whole costume was done by hand), another year he was a Nemian Lion, another year a tank. Last year it was a pilot - but not just any pilot, one who flew a certain type of jet with a unique uniform. And this year... sigh... a "dragon insectoid" (half dragon, half dragonfly). 


In the process of creating these amazing works of imagination, we end up piecing together bits and pieces of all sorts of things. Part of the process is creating the plan, but the far more difficult piece is finding everything you need to put it together. And thus begins my story...


As is our usual process, we first travel around the costume shops to gather inspiration and see if there is anything we can use to enhance the costume. Since this year's creation requires the head of a dragon, in particular I was hoping to find something already made for that piece. I can make wings, and the dragonfly eyes I figured out - but how to make a convincing dragon head? So off we went in search of a dragon mask. 


Always before this year, I've been extremely careful about which sections of the costume store we walk through - but the dragon mask required a little deviation. The masks are usually back with the zombie costumes. So we found ourselves walking through a horror shop, with kidlet's eyes growing larger with each step. I could see it happening - overactive imagination going wild with all of that horrific new information. The clown costume with glowing eyes (think Stephen King's "It") made him stare for a good 2 minutes until I finally pulled him away (with his eyes not leaving the clown's face until we turned a corner and he couldn't see it any more). That was on top of the skeleton at the first store that was motion-activated, and started moving and laughing maniacally when the kidlet walked by - making him jump about a foot off the ground. 


Needless to say, by the end of our shopping trip (which was sadly ineffective in finding a dragon mask), the kidlet was visibly shaken. As we were getting into the car, he complained, "Why is Halloween becoming so much about bad things?!" I had to explain the origins of Halloween (All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day - well that was the version I told him anyway), and also how I've kept him out of those scary parts of the stores before. He listened intently, but I was nervous that the images he'd seen would stay with him, like so many images from the news, or movies, or anything remotely unsettling have done. Welcome to the world of super-sensitivity. He's already hyper-anxious about pretty much everything, and I'd just added some new horrors to his ever-growing list. Great job, mom. 


I remembered as a child having a horrible series of nightmares about a billboard in my town that advertised the Stephen King movie, "Carrie." Nothing could convince me that the blood that covered the front of her gown wasn't her own, from having her skin flayed from her body. In my own over-active imagination, she was dying - and the horrors that had been inflicted upon her were coming for me next. I had nightmares for weeks over that scene. (It wasn't until years later I heard the story of pig's blood being thrown on Carrie in the book/movie.) 


Seeing that look in my kidlet's eyes reminded me of those days... but fortunately the kidlet is much older than I was (4yo) and managed his fear far better than I was able to. I'm pretty sure he has had some nightmares - he hasn't said anything, but he has been extra tired and hyper-sensitive to stimuli during the days. But he will learn from this, as I did, one more step down the road of learning to manage his own over-excitabilities. 


And his costume is going to be great. 

Perspective

As a parent, it's sometimes difficult to keep a realistic perspective of your child. Some of us make the mistake of expecting too much, some of us not enough. 


I think this is especially difficult when you have an only child - and a gifted one at that. I've got no other reference point, other than this one child who is clearly different from most other children his age. So, I have a really hard time keeping perspective on who he is and what he can do. And it goes both ways - sometimes I expect too much, and sometimes not enough. 


A perfect example of this was over the weekend. We attended a marine biology event for gifted children, offered through Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. It was a great opportunity, with lots of fun adventuring and learning (well, I learned a lot). But it made me very conscious of how unique my child really is. I told him there would be other kids "like him," but I was wrong. These kids were clearly quite smart, but they weren't in the same league as the kidlet. Not even close. And the really amazing thing (as his mom, I know these things) is that there he was, astounding the socks off the teachers and other adults, and this isn't even his main area of interest. I could see it in the look I got from one of the teachers, when she asked the kidlet if he wanted to be a marine biologist - clearly expecting that this is a special interest of his - and he said "no, I want to be an inventor." I could have told her that his interest in biology/marine biology/etc lies in his fascination for the mechanics of how things work. 


It made me a little sad, as I was reflecting how hard it is for this little person to find peers - those intellectual peers he might find have no similar interests, while his interest-peers don't follow his logic and don't get his jokes. It's no wonder he doesn't engage others very often. For a socially immature person it's hard enough to know how to enter into and maintain a conversation, but when your experiences mostly end up in misunderstanding and frustration... well, it's easy to understand why he might stop trying. 


But then there's the other side of the "perspective" coin, too. Sometimes I expect him to act like an adult simply because he can reason like an adult. But that's not appropriate, either. When he is falling apart in tears because he made a mistake that can't be undone, I have to remind myself that he is still a child. When he has days that require more physical movement ("run around breaks"), or he has trouble calming himself over something exciting - I have to remind myself that he is still a child, and still learning skills that most adults take for granted. Yes, he is definitely behind the curve in some areas, as much as he is ahead of it in others... which makes it doubly important for DH and I to set appropriate expectations (and doubly hard to know what ARE appropriate expectations. Grade level expectations, while his maturity isn't grade level? Is that fair?). 


I hope that I am keeping my expectations realistic - whether intellectual, social, or emotional. I hope that I am giving the kidlet the support he needs to become better at those things in which he does not excel, while continuing to find joy and interest in those areas in which he is beyond the curve. 

Resilience

If there is one thing I am trying to teach the kidlet, it is the amorphous quality of resilience. You know, that thing that makes you keep trying after something doesn't work out quite right, or that makes you push through when something is hard. 


Wikipedia starts its article on resilience like this: 

Resilience in psychology is the positive capacity of people to cope with stress and adversity. This coping may result in the individual “bouncing back” to a previous state of normal functioning, or using the experience of exposure to adversity to produce a “steeling effect” and function better than expected (much like an inoculation gives one the capacity to cope well with future exposure to disease).[1] Resilience is most commonly understood as a process, and not a trait of an individual.

Resilience is important for everyone, but it can be elusive for gifted people. Since most things come easily for someone who is gifted, they don't encounter enough push-back in early years with the frequency that most people do. So they don't learn how to move through it and find the successes on the other side. In fact, for highly gifted or broadly gifted people, even the slightest bit of resistance can lead to full melt-downs or quitting. 


We have spent quite a bit of time recently dealing with the inadequacy of the kidlet's resilience level. He hates being unable to do something, so he refuses to try. My favorite illustration of this was back when he was closing in on 4 years old, and not yet potty-trained. His younger cousin had just been potty trained, so I asked the kidlet when he was going to do it. He asked me when he needed to have it done. I told him that I'd heard if he wasn't potty-trained by the time he was 4, we'd have to go to the doctor to be checked out. He told me then that he would be trained when he was 4. He still refused to try out the potty chair, but what do you know - on his 4th birthday he put on big-boy underpants and never looked back (for day or night!). He had to be sure he could do it before he'd be seen trying. It's been the same story all along - riding a bike, sports, handwriting, and especially anything to do with academics. Frustration builds fast and ends up in melt-down mode when challenged to try something that is difficult. 


Most people know that most things that are worth doing take a little bit of work - but someone who has never had to work for anything doesn't connect the level of work with a positive result. If you've never had to work hard/ think hard/ try hard / practice hard /etc. in order to accomplish something that gets accolades and rave reviews, once you hit that point where you need to work (and in order to really succeed at something, you've got to hit that point), instead of giving you that sense of, "okay, I can do this!" - it feels like a failure. 


One of the final straws at the last school kidlet attended was when the math teacher told me that she wasn't pushing the kidlet to do hard math problems because she didn't, "want to frustrate him." After three years of that kind of attitude, his resilience level is on the Delicates cycle. So we've been pushing him pretty hard to work through the tough problems and get the right answer (and go back and check it to make sure before you move on to the next math problem). I love hearing the sound in his voice when he finishes some exercises and says, "I got 100%!" - or even when he is re-doing some problems he'd done poorly on and says, "I improved by 200%!" Not only does that tell me that he is understanding the work, but that he is getting positive feedback from his attempts at resilience. And next time, maybe it won't be so hard to find the courage to keep trying.


A piece of paper in the kidlet's work area quotes Albert Einstein: "One should not pursue goals that are easily achieved. One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one's greatest efforts." It is there to remind the kidlet (and me!) that effort is not only worthwhile, but a positive aspect of achievement. 


Sadly, when faced with something that is difficult, it is all too easy to quit. But then you never get the satisfaction of knowing that you conquered something that was hard. Resilience definitely builds upon itself - the more success you find (and that great feeling that this was hard but you did it anyway), the more you will be willing to keep trying when failure looms. 


Keep going, kidlet! I know you can do it! But you need to know it, too.