Gracie

I looked out the window the other day and the snow was coming down in big fluffy chunks the size of a fist.  It was really pretty.  I quickly lobbied Grace to come outside for a picture.  She is wearing a sleeveless dress under the coat and has bare legs.  By the time we got out there, the snow was back to the normal, fluffy stuff. We still shot a few frames.  She wouldn't put her tongue back in for me.





Grace still gets so frustrated when something doesn't live up to her expectations.  Sometimes it is something like her facepainting at the winter festival wasn't what she expected, so she cries and I get mad because it is rude to the nice teenage girl who painted it.  I don't want to invalidate disappointment.  It's an authentic emotion.  But how to teach her how to also be polite and grateful?  Sometimes she is edgy and her expectations are so completely unreasonable that nothing will make her happy.  Again, I feel for her and her levels of anxiety and frustration.  But the net effect on her behavior is not at all acceptable.

It is becoming a problem for her at school.  She hates to get answers wrong.  She had a timed math test where she was supposed to do 30 simple addition problems in 2 minutes.  She can do the addition problems.  Everyone she did at home was right - no errors.  When I set the timer so she could practice the timed test, she had an honest to goodness panic attack right in front of me.  Picture my little 6 year old still scratching away with her pencil at this page full of addition problems with big, fat tears streaming down her face and her chest heaving faster and faster until she sort of started hyperventilating.  This is not good.  Then, she gets mad and turns the bad feelings outward, and comes at me for distracting her or yells that the chair is too low at the table or the pencil is not sharp enough.  It's not pretty.  In fact, it's downright ugly sometimes and I lose patience more than I'd like to.  The heart of it, though, is a very small girl who is having some very big feelings. I remind myself of this when she's screaming at me.  Not screaming, exactly, to be fair.  More like loud, vehement but also sort of pathetic whining.

We are very confident that Grace has dyslexia.  Her reading tutor (who is wonderful) totally agrees.  The word dyslexia seems to be not always in vogue, but it's clear to me from reading up about it that it fits Grace to a tee.  So this compounds the frustration for her, I think.  She has to work extra hard to do things that are obviously coming naturally to so many of the other kids.  She really tries so hard (even though she sometimes masks it with outbursts).  It's tough to watch.

This is her spelling test.  She got two wrong.  Not because she spelled the word wrong, but because she had two letter reversals.  She told Derek that she can't remember which way the s goes.  But notice she had it right other places on the test.  She says she always feels the d looks wrong to her (when it is written correctly).  She was so upset this morning that she got two wrong. I didn't know why at the time, but I came into the room when she was vigorously and violently brushing her own hair while sobbing about how, "it doesn't feel straight!!!  It doesn't feel STRAIGHT!!! Why doesn't it FEEL STRAIGHT?!?"  Grace's hair is poker straight, i have always marvelled at it's ability to fall back into it's flat shape no matter what.   Derek just looked at me over her head and said, "she's upset about the spelling test."  Enough said.

What I notice about the test is this - see on the word 'dish'.  She first wrote a q and erased it, then she wrote a b and erased it, then she got it correct by writing 'dish'.  Same on 'pen'.  You can see where she erased both a q and a b before she put the p down.  She fixed 'best' once, from initially writing 'pest'.  In my head I can see her sitting there agonizing over not wanting to get it wrong and writing letters and erasing them and still not being sure that they "look right".  She knows it's supposed to be a 'd'.  She doesn't think the word is spelled pish, with a 'p' sound at the front.  She just gets it backwards when she tries to write it.  There are a total of 13 p's, d's, and b's on that test.  Imagine having to work so hard one each one of them.

Gracie will learn just like we all do how to deal with the challenges in her path.  I'm sure this won't be the biggest one she finds in her life.  She's got so much going for her.  She'll do great.  It is much more heartbreaking to watch them struggle then I ever would have guessed it would be, though.