This will be a long post....

I really needed a major hug today. This post is probably going to much more information than I ever thought I would share. But, I really need to get it out.

I may delete the entire thing....who knows.

I do want to ask that no one comments on this post....I know I am a good mother and I know things will work out....

Let's see, where to start (again - this will be long and will probably jump around ALOT)

Colin is born on Nov 1st. The cut-off for school in our state (at the time) was December 31. But, if I lived in the next state over, then Colin would miss the cut-off for school by 2 hours. Yup, I said 2 hours. In most parts of the next state, the cut-off to start school ins Oct 31. Well, Colin was born at 2 in the morning - so missing the cut-off by 2 hours.

OK - let's back up a little. Colin did not start speaking until he was 3 years old. Back then there really was not EI. And I really did not think about it too much. He is a late speaker - big deal. He got by just fine. I knew he understood me.

He was in Kindergarten at 4 years 10 months. Well, it was brought to my attention that the school does not use phonics to teach the kids to read. They use a program called "whole word". Well, it was apparent that Colin did not do too well with whole word. And because this was the way he was taught, he really did not know phonics either.

I noticed that by the end of kindergarten, he was not reading yet. It seemed that based on the items hanging in the classroom that the other kids were reading and writing at a much higher level.

Colin has ALWAYS been a super sweet boy. So, I think his teachers let him get away with certain things because he is a really sweet little boy.

When Colin did start reading, he would always substitute words. It is hard to explain, he would get the idea of the sentence and then just use a word that started the same. It was like he was trying to figure out from memory what the whole word was. As an example (off the top of my head), would be a sentence like: "On Sunday, my father and I went to the park" He would read out loud and say, "On Sunday, my father and I went to a picnic" Yes, in this case, the sentence made sense - even though it is not the correct words. But this was not always the case.

I also noticed that he had really bad handwriting - I mean REALLY bad. When you actually paid attention, you noticed that he wrote the letter completely in the wrong order. Instead of starting letters and numbers at the top, he would start from the bottom, or the side and basically "re-create" the letter.

I brought this to the attention of the teacher, and she said it would be something that would self correct itself.

By third grade, it was really apparent that there was something that was totally off balance. It seemed like it took him the whole year just to catch up to everyone else. And he was constantly playing the "catch - up" game.

So, I wanted him evaluated by the school. I thought for sure there was a reason for all this. Now, keep in mind that again, he was always a sweet sweet boy.

We started with the evaluation with the school. They test for everything. IQ, ADD, Dyslexia, etc.

Well, at this time of the testing, his IQ measured at 145! Which is considered exceptional. In every area that tests for specific things, he measured in the 90-99 percent.

Well, that is witht the exception of one.

The test that measures dyslexia - well, he scored a 32. Yup, that is a 32 out of 100. I thought, "finally, we have an answer" Not exactly.

A score of 32 is still in the "normal" range. What??? I see you are confussed. As was I. You see, the test is on a bell curve. Which means that a score of 25-75 is considered "average".

A score of 32 would mean no services provided by the school system. A score of 32 means that since his IQ was so high that he was able to "trick" the results. A score of 32 means nothing.

This ends this post - I will add more later.

I am sorry this was so long