Those 2e Eggs Just Keep On Popping Up

Those 2e Eggs Just Keep on Popping Up, yellowreadis.com Image: Toy pan with four toy eggs on wooden floor

You know, when I started this parenting gig, I didn’t really know a lot – hell, what parent does? There’s been highs and lows – the highs are really really high, the lows . . . let’s just say that the Mariana Trench has a lot going for it.

But somewhere along the line, I kind of got the impression that if my kids were hitting the milestones at roughly the right time, “all was well”. (The right time, of course was statistically figured out with a bell curve. They’re really neat and rather mathematically beautiful. I actually like them, as an idea).

Somewhere, in the depths of over eight years of overwhelm, the bit of my brain that used to sigh with relief when my kids hit those milestones exactly on time got rewritten. Now, when a nurse or doctor assures me that something is perfectly normal, just what they expected of child brain/body/whatever development, I go into full-fledged panic mode. Even though the maths part of my brain keeps reassuring me that my kids have to fall inside the middle of the bell curve for some things, another, perhaps more realistic part of my brain will go “you keep believing that if you like, buster, but I’ll be over here locking myself in the panic room.”
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Book Review – Writing Your Own Script

Book Review: Writing Your Own Script, A Parent's Role in the Gifted Child's Social Development, yellowreadis.com Image book cover artoon children

‘As parents, we may really want to believe the common wisdom that if we place our children in a typical childhood setting, “They will be fine.”  It can be difficult to separate what others say and what we believe to be true. As parents, we don’t always trust our own instinct. We should.’

 
Finding practical ways to help people understand and work with your neuro – atypical children can be hard. Even when you understand what your child needs to thrive, how do you go about convincing others? I found Corin Barsily Goodwin and Mika Gustavson’s new book “Writing Your Own Script: A Parent’s Role in the Gifted Child’s Social Development”, helped me to understand that journey into the unknown.

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Creating an Unschooling Environment for my 2e Kids

Creating an Unschooling Environment for my 2e Kids, Image: Analog clock

Adapting our homeschooling environment to support our kids needs has been a work in progress that has taken years of trial and error. I personally love the idea of self-directed learning and unschooling, but I have had to adapt it to fit the needs of my children.

As much as I would love to be able to say ‘you can do whatever you want’ and let it happen (with me strewing and facilitating, but having the kids in charge), it hasn’t happened. Instead, we have taken a lot of slow, small steps in that direction, and have had to treat it as more of an end goal than a blueprint.

Over time, (and with an understanding of their neurological differences) I have come to understand why my children need support and why those supports need to be different for each child.

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Is Giftedness a Bad Thing?

Picture from Pixabay

There was a conversation that I had quite some time ago that is still bugging me, and being a writer, inevitably that means I end up putting words on paper  in order to figure it out in my own head.  The conversation, for all its twists and turns could be boiled down to one question . . . ‘Is giftedness a bad thing?” You see, once you let go of the assumptions and myths that surround giftedness, and start to understand how many of the characteristics and behaviours of gifted people either resemble certain other conditions (like Autism, ADHD, OCD etc), inevitably, giftedness starts to lose some of the false-shine of being a ‘gift’ . . .
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I’ll Be Over Here … Hiding In The Cupboard

I'll Be Over Here Hiding in the Cupboard, yellowreadis.com. Image: Slightly open cupboard door

Recently, I’ve realised how hard it can be to do all the things. I have lists of things I have been staring at in a state of almost-horror, and the longer the lists get, the more I hide from them. It has taken me a while to realise that the reason I am not getting ‘things’ done – is because we’ve stumbled into one of those times when busy takes over. It’s not just the Christmas season, though that’s usually enough for me to go into full-on hide in the cupboard mode.
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