Cautious calm

I don’t want to jinx myself but Hayley has been doing so well. I think the core thing to remember is that her chronological age is not her emotional age. She is nine in terms of birthdays but she is really about eight based on maturity. That’s no crime in any child but when you consider all the chaos it isn’t a big deal.

She has been great about going to school since it started Monday. Very polite and well-spoken - a lot of thank yous these days. Most important only ONE hit in ten days and it was pretty much inadvertent elbow screaming. She may yell and backtalk but we are just focusing on one thing at a time, the hitting. We even praise her for yelling and not hitting. She is soaking in the positive reinforcement and it is really making a difference. Don’t underestimate how hard walking away can be.

Third grade seems a good fit for her emotionally. She is already doing math that they don’t even do in third grade. She got some flak from one kid about repeating the year but this kid has been giving her crap since 1st grade.

She even had a classmate we didn’t know about come down to say hey yesterday. He lives right around the corner basically. So that’s three kids in her class already that are in our neighborhood.

Our webkinz blog has taken off. It started climbing over the past few weeks, hitting about 600-800 page views a day. Then the past week has been a new high almost every day. Friday - 1,300 page views… Saturday - 1,800 page views and then today a whopping 4,733 page views and one post with 350 comments alone. Hayley is so excited by it all, she predicts page count totals each day.

Evidently parents are cool with their kids on the blog b/c it is overseen by a mother and the kids like to trade object through the blog, not to mention get hints, etc. I’ve had so many nice posts from parents. One told me that their kid had read more of our blog than the combination of all the books he cracked - and the parent thought it was awesome because the kid was happy to read it, looking for tips and such. At this rate, Hayley might be near the same levels in terms of how much she has written or work on this summer.

Hayley loves posting on it. She is now comfortable with taking a screenshot, cropping and saving it in photoshop, then ftping it to our server and posting it in the blog with some text. I helped her but she typed her first line of straight html on Friday. She can now copy an img src line and edit it to call a different image. How cool is that??

I’ve even got some of the regular kids to start their own blogs and helped them with some basic html stuff. I like interacting with them all this way.

I fear Hayley will never be the kind of kid who likes schoolwork. So far, she doesn’t have the focus of Jeff or the curiousity about things that I had but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things and ways of learning that she won’t excel in. She could be a late bloomer anyway but knowing she can do something - something most kids can’t - is really good for her self-esteem and her academic skills. Perhaps she is a graphic learner and will use visual things to illustrate her work. She might be a photographer, a graphic designer, a fashion designer, an architect, who knows. But as Jeff said tonight, we just need to play to her strengths and go from there. And right now, her unabashed love of webkinz tops the list.

Peace

Things have been remarkably peaceful eventhough we are just as busy as can be. Soccer has just ended for the year but her challenge soccer tryouts are soon. Tennis lessons just started for a few weeks and we switched to a new stable for riding that is more involved. Swim team has started practice and we have a mock meet in about 9 days. She has been so kind to the other younger kids she knows who are in their first year of swim team.

The End of Grade tests were earlier this week and we got word today that she passed the reading part on or above grade level, which is really great news. We still are going to let her repeat this year but she is ok with that too. It really is for the best.

She’s learning how saying ‘thank you’ and ‘I’m sorry’ in normal tones works so much better than snarling it. It has taken us so long to get that through to her. She is content being silly more. She still gets in trouble and melts down but far more often she just apologizes and makes it right. Such a nice change!

Some of the spring clothes I got her are coming up short on her now. So I’m getting some size 10s too and now size 1.5 for her shoes for tennis. I’ve got to get her started on cigarettes and coffee soon. This growth thing doesn’t seem to be stopping on its own!

Oh yeah, I had my stylist highlight some of my hair blonde AND…bright pink! It looks awesome and I really am tickled by it. Hayley wants her hair short with some pink too now.

It is quiet here now. Jeff took her to the club for tennis and then she is going home with her friends from there. They’ll bring her home late night and we might just get to watch a R movie until then. Then we have swim team in the morning, a kids party at the pool, a fishing derby at the pond next to the pool after and a BBQ that night - I think by then we’ll just some home and cook out. Sunday we are going over to our friend’s Mark and Andrea’s house for a cookout for Memorial Day and because Mark defended his Phd thesis on yesterday in some brilliant part of chemistry. I’m happy for him but it also means they’ll probably be moving soon.

Hope everyone has a good Memorial Day weekend!

Hayley’s blog!!!

Hayley’s blog http://atomicolicious.wordpress.com/

Why does my nine year old have a blog for her webkinz game play you might be asking right now?

When I was young, my parents gave me a typewriter and I would retype my own version of the sports page. Eventually, I got a computer at 11. I find it no coincidence that I work in developing sports sites with a media background.

Want to enrich your child’s learning - find what interests them at the moment and work inside that framework. I try hard to make learning creative and fun. I think you can find something to benefit educationally in almost anything - the more offbeat the better to me. At nine, this is a great age to let her expand into all sorts of things.

This is also different time and age than any of us grew up in and it is imperative that children learn to integrate technology into their life in useful ways. Computer and internet skills will benefit our child no matter what she wants to be (unless it is a Luddite of course!).

I’m a web developer and this is just another way I’m trying to help Hayley learn. Like how we use webkinz itself, I try to find ways for Hayley to have fun AND gain skills. I try to steer her towards the more educational or logic based game play in webkinz. She’s learned some about money and math comparing W Shop and Curio Shop prices. We’ve worked on excel with a spreadsheet for tracking her gems.

And a blog is our latest effort on that path. She can keep track of stuff to help her game play and remember cool things (like her cherry jackpot) while working on typing and spelling. She’s writing more than she does normally as well! She’s learning how to fill in blanks and use a templated system to post info on the web. She’s learning how to ftp to our server and post the image online, not to mention how to use photoshop in a very basic way.

Maybe she’ll get bored and we’ll dump this. But maybe it’ll spur her interest to write more or design video games, or be an internet pundit - but overall I hope I’m helping her be creative and plant those seeds. Who knows, maybe it is just a goofy way to have fun with my kid too

calling home

Hayley is now calling home 2-3 days a week to talk to me. Sometimes it is illness, sometimes drama (personal or school). But the illnesses are always very minor and amazingly gone often by the time she gets home.

She is a healthy kid in general and as a mom, you know when a child is really sick for the most part - the temperature, the skin coloring, stomach, etc. When I do come get her because I think it might be serious enough to be real, she is ready to watch TV or play outside almost immediately. That no longer works here at home anymore, sick means you don’t do anything but watch TV, nap or take a bath.

Lately I try to talk her down on the phone and she is responsive to that, I can get her back to class most of the time. However she is missing school time just going to the office and as a child with ADHD who gets a daily behavioral sheet, she does not need to be up and down in the classroom.

I think she is just reaching out for me but I need to equip her with some other coping mechanism to not need to grab for me so often during the school day. She is still needy at home, still clingy at times and I see that as a need inside her for me, for a safe and secure place that is going to be there for her. At practice, she continues to love to jump up into my lap - most especially when she is happy and leaping onto me so it isn’t always an anxiety thing.

If we have to repeat the cycle of having her emotional needs met 10,000 times, we will … but it needs to be reasonable for her educational process as well.

how good can repetition be?

Hayley’s very excellent school wants us to consider repeating this year (third grade). She has ADD and is always just a step behind when it comes to really processing things. This came up before but we’ve said no because we just felt like she needed to press forward.

We took steps to help her catch up and stay on level. She has a one on one reading tutor who is a teacher in the school system and is in a math program (Kumon) ( a combined $240 a month) Plus I supplement on the weekends or slow nights to help go over concepts as well as more reps.

Basically she is on reading and math level too but she can’t always independently express this stuff according the school. She is on level enough not to qualify for extra assistance in school - she did last year. A social butterfly, she has tons of friends and likes school.
Many organic signs point to repeating for HER benefit - she was premature, born to a young mother, eventually placed in foster care after abuse and neglect. She missed a lot of early educational routines and learning while she going through hell and back. Physically she is always one of the smallest in the class outside of a very diminutive Asian girls.

We’ve also been to pediatric neurology and education testing group for two full evaluations (in 05 and 06). Her IQ is fine and places her in a group that would be expected to be able to go to college. She does has ADD and she has a not uncommon speed processing issue. She has a psych to handle medications with also has a very low dose of an anti-depressant. Her active therapy with a specialists who deals with adoption and other related issues has concluded because she was doing so well dealing with the issues in her life.

I don’t want to break her spirit. I don’t want her to have to explain all of this to friends and get teased. It breaks my heart but I think academically it is the best call. She is getting so tired of having to struggle and we can see we are starting to lose her in terms of school, etc.

I’m tired of the hassle too. I want learning to be fun. Tonight is a great example of us playing a math game for fun and not having either of us upset. My husband and I are both book and history nuts, college educated and grad work (he’s a CPA, my grad program is on hold since she came). Education and learning is a big deal in our world and we want to continue to share those experiences with her.

Part of me wishes this decision wasn’t on us but that’s what parenting is about.

House of hard knocks

It has been a tough two weeks in our house. We are trying to teach our daughter how to work more independently as well as be more accountable. Maybe that sounds a bit over zealous for dealing with an almost eight year old but she has never had to deal with either of those issues. The lack of ability or really familiarity with them causes her problems in school and to a lesser extend at home.

When she would have been exposed to that as a younger child, her birth family was chaos. Her foster family did a wonderful job but their work was mostly putting out the fires in her emotional well being. After everything she has been through, people often don’t expect much from her but that does her no good in growing up and being a productive person. She needs expectations to be put on her, she needs to be pushed some.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not out there driving her like a sled dog but we do expect she step up to challenge of conducting herself appropriately. It isn’t just abused kids that can fall into this trap - I’ve seen kids who weren’t abused at all but were spoiled and weren’t expected to manage their behaviors and actions turn out to be self-involved, rude and cold people.

The biggest problem is she doesn’t want to do homework on her own. We believe in making school work fun - you can’t learn when you are arguing, so our efforts have gone towards engaging her in the process. We have stacks of books, games, workbooks, programs and such to entice her to learn. She is allowed to do homework sitting next to us or even in my lap. However, we have found that she will ask for help before she even needs it.

Understand that this is a child with no developmental delay or learning disabilities. She has been tested by experts over two days to determine her IQ and learning potential are just like everyone else. She does have mild ADHD but we work hard to help with that as well. Her deficiencies were more related to simply being behind. She has had a tutor for over a year and made amazing progress. Yesterday in fact she came up another reading level, her fourth this school year, and she is now at the benchmark (minimum) for her class. We don’t want her hovering at the minimum but she was far behind it. In 13 months, she’s gone from a 1-2 reading level to 19-20 - pretty dang great!

When she was younger, we definitely helped more with getting concepts down, especially in math. Now we expect her to give it a try before she cries ‘uncle’ and we are not going to listen to her argue with us when she is wrong. It is sort of funny but mostly completely annoying when a seven year old tries to tell you that you are wrong about basic math concepts.

The second semester of second grade, we’ve decided she needs to work on her homework and bring it to us when she is done for checking. We are no longer going to go problem by problem and bicker. We made it clear that was how things were going to go and just to hammer the message home, we decided to let her screw up royally for a few weeks.

We’ll remind her she has to do homework but we will not have fights to get her to do her homework. That is HER job, she is a part of this family and needs to do her part. So if she ignores us or blows it off, fine - she can suffer the consequences of failing her spelling test and of her teacher being mad she didn’t do homework. She is young enough where people being mad or disappointed in her is still something that upsets her. And of course, if you are failing, you can’t have friends over to play, you aren’t going to the movies, etc. We fully intend to structure her homework time more firmly in the future but for now, we are using this as a teaching tool.

She appears to be slowly getting the message. She did most of her homework on her own and brought it to me to be checked. A lot of it was wrong so I helped her with a few hints and sent her back to work it out. Most of it she worked out on her own, to her great pride. A small victory for both us of - she is learning how smart and capable she really is. Of course on Thursday she pulled some more junk and at bedtime, she realized she was not done and would have to turn it in incomplete. She was very unhappy so we hope she learned something with that one too.

So we’ll start this all over again on Monday and see how it goes.

School projects

Last month my daughter’s teacher assigned her second grade class an immigration project during a unit on immigration. I like this teacher and more importantly, my daughter adores him. However the project had some language that could present some problems for adopted children - be it domestic newborns adoptions, foster adoptions or international adoptions.

Immigration, family trees and bringing in baby photos tend to be problems for some adopted children in terms of school projects. Handling them with your child and their teacher can be tricky but it can also be a great chance to let your child express their thoughts.

One of the questions in the project was why did your family leave their country of origin. If you are internationally adopted, the rest of your first family didn’t leave. Or maybe your adopted child doesn’t know anything about their heritage - is their project complete if they just include their forever family’s information? That’s a call you’ll have to make. The project also was limiting in their definition of “family”.

I wrote a pleasant letter to our daughter’s teacher and explained my feelings. I didn’t want her to be granted any special treatment but I wanted it to be fair for her and for other children from different kinds of families. I sent him a few links to look at and he quickly responded with an email that he would take a look at everything. He mentioned in nine years this was his first adopted child so he just had not dealt with these issues. I was shocked she was the first and suspected we were just the first family that was so open about it.

Next Monday when I opened Hayley’s backpack, there was a note about the assignment. He modified the entire assignment to make it friendly to families of all kinds! Instead of narrow definitions of ‘family’, he put ‘people who love you’. He made nothing mandatory and make it all suggestions of what to do, offering children the chance to do the project their way. After all, it is doing the project that matters and learning, not doing it exactly the same as everyone else.

I explained it all to my daughter and we decided to include all of her families - all the people who love her. We were lucky enough to know she has some Irish ancestors as do I, so we focused on the Irish and her father’s Norwegian heritage. We had lots of photos on the project and she included her biological grandparents as well. It looked great and it truly represented her heritage. It turned out to be another chance for her to learn more and feel positive about her first family.

She went to school so proud of it. She came home beaming, a room mother saw her project and said that her son too was adopted. So not only did this teacher have one adopted child, he had TWO just in this class!

I know some people aren’t comfortable with broadcasting their adoption story. For some families it has faded over the years and they just don’t think too much about it. But being open about adoption is a GOOD thing. Most teachers are caring professionals who want your child’s learning experience to be positive. Of course, respect your child’s privacy and make sure they understand what is being talked about. If the teacher isn’t interested, consider working with guidance counselors at the school to raise adoption sensitivity in the school.

As a family you can turn this ‘assignment problem’ into a chance to talk about their first family and let them learn as much as you know. Even if you don’t know much about their specific background, you can look at the region or the country they are from.