The blandest looking blog on the Web

Without formatting, this blog is going to be the blandest thing ever. I want bold. I want italic. I want color, dang it. But I'm attached to Safari. I've got so many bookmarks and they are organized just the way I want them.

So Friday is a school conference day: come 1:30 I will get to hear my kiddo and his teacher talk about the year so far and I am surprisingly anxious about it. My sense is that he's doing really well. I would say that he is making enormous strides, compared to what my expectations were. I feel like that sets the bar too high, though, and I should be prepared for worse news!!

In the beginning of the year, his resource teacher said that sometimes kids were just not developmentally ready to read at the same time as everyone else. Two years ago, I would have totally agreed. Since then I have been so convinced about the verdict of processing disorder/dyslexia that it was almost hard for me to hear that, but now...well, he's really making progress.

There's a part of me that wants to believe that he's not dyslexic at all.

On the other hand, there is a speech dysfluency that goes along with the diagnosis--these delays that I hear in his speech when he's trying to retrieve information, even simple information. It's not a stutter; it's a slowness. He speaks much less fluidly (albeit with an enormous vocabulary) then do other kids his age. And that's the processing disorder. That's the information being filed in the right side of his brain, and so taking longer to retrieve. That thing is the same thing that has made reading so challenging.

I think maybe it's natural to waver, to wonder whether it's real, to think maybe, maybe...The idea that he just needed to do it in his own time is so appealing. But I don't really think that's true. Reading came so easily to me, so hard to him. Even if there was something developmental there, I do believe he's dyslexic, and that he always will be. I'm also beginning to believe, though, that he's going to be able to read someday. Really read, not just painfully piece together the words.