who teaches whom

I think the kids spent the equivalent of a full school day watching telly today. The six-year-old cried out at bedtime that she hadn’t had time to do ANY playing. But here they are cooperatively excavating a dinosaur; one to dig and one to brush and take notes.

They can’t tidy up the dust yet because it helps it look like a real archaeologists’ site. Maybe I can get them to damp it down, since archaeologists are usually working in mud?

Everyone and their gran has been blogging about ASD and ADHD lately.

So I’ll join in.

My eldest child was unusually verbally capable. She was “preternaturally self-possessed.” Her social skills, from age about 15 months to 4 years, were shockingly good. She was obviously extremely bright. She went on sleepovers in other people’s houses from age three without the slightest qualm or loss of confidence. She never had a special toy or blankie or soother or any other affection object. She absorbed, analysed and retained information. She had a long attention span and would focus on an activity for over an hour at a time, as a toddler — several times a day. She molded herself to the needs of her friends and extended family with careful negotiation and a tamping down of her own preferences to achieve social acceptability, especially where she wasn’t confident of unconditional acceptance.

And it all spilled out in other ways. I coped very badly with it and her other parent almost didn’t cope at all — not coped badly, but wasn’t part of the situation, leaving the familial adaptations to me. After years of high-stress, complex family life, with me assuming the problems were all down to my own mental and emotional inadequacies, we realised that treating her as a child with ADHD and ASD made everyone much, much happier.

It still does.

She doesn’t have a formal diagnosis, just my maternal flailing about through the parenting books and talking to a GP or four. Her baby sister has huge tonsils causing sleep apnea and we’re having them removed in two weeks; the tonsillectomy literature says that it can be a cause of ADHD-type behaviours due to chronic sleep apnea affecting ability to govern oneself when awake. So I’m going to look into that too, because yeah, the huge tonsils haven’t stopped my eldest breathing but they might be inhibiting her oxygen intake without actually STOPPING it.

I’m not sure whether we’ll ever pursue neurological diagnoses. But the behavioural challenges we were living with are solved using techniques used by families coping with autism. It’s just a different way of being, and adapting to it was relatively easy once we figured out what to change.

Living without adapting to it was bloody awful. You can’t hammer a round child into a square hole, even with a really big hammer.

E noticed that the hoop’s shadow is like a calligraphy pen O.

The younger two spent happy hours today with mud. They planted some things we got posted by a big gardening co., and then used the remaining dirt to build something.

Meanwhile I helped the eldest to make a Lego board game and talked about my reasons for ant genocide (they’re invading our front room due to birthday party crumbs).

Cycling has not come easily to my firstborn. An accident with a scooter didn’t help. But yesterday she balance biked all the way into town and back, before we or the pedals on her bike, and today she cycled 1.5 miles each way to a supermarket. Not bad for her first day pedaling. In her own time. Now lightning fast!

Birthday treat: we looked at dinosaurs through the hoardings keeping the public away from the roof repair, and did the mouse finding trail around the Pitt Rivers to get stickers. Totally. Satisfied. Children. Who now have a lump of rose quartz of their very own.

Staying up late to watch Bill Bailey talk about evolution and Wallace and the illegal animal trade. I do love the BBC a lot.

I would love to know what informs their composition decisions when they sneak off work my camera and take hundreds of photos. The ones of them making faces at each other are obvious, as are the attempts at stop motion animation. But this?!