Her smile is the light of my life.
Disclaimers:
This is going to be an insanely difficult post to summarize in its entirety—for a whole host of reasons. But before diving in, because I’m a Mama Bear to the core, and also sensitive to this complex subject matter, I’ve gotta issue some very important disclaimers.
First: this rambling, novel-length post will be laden with the type of details this story deserves. So if you’re uninterested in the minutiae, abandon now. This won’t be your jam!
Second: if you’re a friend or a family member and you’re reading the word “dyslexia” with surprise, and wondering why in the world this is the first you’re hearing of it…you’re not alone. But also: sorry, not sorry!
This story has been Chicklet’s lifetime in the making, her official dyslexia diagnosis and literacy intervention has been two years in the works, and as a parent who only wants the best and brightest path for my child, I needed a while to marinate and decide what was best to share. Again—sorry, not sorry! ;)
Third: if you’re reading this and in any way judging me for sharing this information on behalf of my child, then you likely have unfounded, misinformed or negative associations with dyslexia—and that’s just not what we’re about, here!
Positivity is our guiding principle on this front—both at home, and at school. And I’m excited to do my part to help promote wonderful connotations surrounding my kiddo, in particular, and dyslexia, in general.
Which leads me to my final disclaimer…
Fourth: I am not a child psychologist. Nor am I an educational diagnostician, a reading specialist, or a teacher. Though all of the aforementioned have been involved in Chicklet’s journey. I am simply a parent who LOVES HER CHILD (like crazy!) and knows her better than anyone else in the world.
This is simply one story.
Her story.
(Admittedly, shared through my own lens).
It’s in no way representative of anyone or anything beyond our own, unique experience.
So.
With ALL THAT said...let’s dive in!
Early Signs
Again, for so many of you who know or are a part of our family, this might seem so out of left field.
How did we even suspect any reading difficulties for our Chicklet???
When did all this even happen???
How did we get to the point of a diagnosis???
Welp.
The answer to that is not short. And it was also a loooooong time coming.
When Chicklet was as young as three years old, the hubby and I would have many lengthy, lively discussions surrounding our observations of our amazing, magical child.
Some of those discussions were rooted in worries about Chicklet’s unique milestone progression.
Or specifics we noticed about her speech patterns or letter and number knowledge.
Or even the way she sometimes struggled to recall certain words and would get so frustrated that she couldn’t convey exactly what she was trying to say (but could often come up with words that were so close to what her brain was trying to retrieve).
I can so very clearly remember standing firm on the belief that there was nothing wrong with our girl (and there most certainly ISN’T!) and that we just needed to give her time and not compare her to siblings or other children, and just let her be.
Moreover, whenever we would get to a point where enough tiny things made us consider seeking any sort of detailed evaluation regarding her learning tendencies, our Chicklet would often have some sort of cognitive growth spurt that set our minds at ease, and we’d move on.
Now.
Fast forward to kindergarten a few years ago, and the magic of being in a classroom full of other kiddos, partaking in benchmark testing, and getting to the point where sight words came in to play.
That’s when things started getting a bit more interesting.
By the second half of Chicklet’s kindergarten year, I was beginning to express a bit of concern—admittedly, coupled with a some parental frustration and worry that perhaps the hubby and I weren’t doing enough to help.
Chicklet just wasn’t having any of those ah-ha! reading moments where things started to spark and click. And after day upon day of time spent tutoring her and studying her phonetic attempts up close and personal, I just knew in my absolute Mama gut there was something at play we needed to investigate.
So we decided to officially reach out to her teacher with the request of digging a bit deeper.
And, what do you suppose happened next??
A GLOBAL FREAKING PANDEMIC!
Pandemic-Compounded Complications
So...remember when we were all on lockdown and pulling our hair out, trying to deal with life and illness and the upheaval of working from home—along with educating our kiddos via zoom???
Try throwing some learning concerns into the mix (at a time when people were frantically trying to locate and purchase toilet paper, sanitize their groceries, and just basically try to stay as sequestered and healthy as humanly possible).
I mean, this is hands-down one of my favorite pics to represent this time:
It was Chicklet, about a minute after she logged off her iPad for that particular school day, and she was pretty much representing alllllll my feels, ha.
I mean…GOD BLESS all of the teachers and administrators who had to pull off a very complicated final nine weeks of school in the Spring of 2020, when distance learning was still finding its footing.
Needless to say, having a large-scale, let’s-talk-about-signs-of-dyslexia conversation with Chicklet’s teacher DURING THAT EXACT TIMEFRAME, just…ugh.
But all that said, I really wasn’t keen on wasting time getting to the root of any complications. Pandemic or not!
So when I pushed to get a bit more information regarding Chicklet’s situation—considering her benchmark testing always indicated she was scoring in line with or above normative levels in reading—I was diverted to our elementary school’s reading specialist.
And that’s when I finally had a contact who could help me the way I needed. Amen, Halleluiah!
Enter…an absolute GODSEND of a teacher:
Mrs. H (as we’ll call her from here on out; though her official title is pretty much Angel Sent From Heaven) has become one of my favorite people on earth.
In fact, when theorizing about the bigger Why Are We In San Antonio picture, Mrs. H is absolutely, hands down one of the positives the hubby and I always recognize.
She immediately dove into Chicklet’s benchmark testing, rather than just looking at her overall scores. And what she discovered was something that’s often a pretty standard red flag of dyslexia: various components of Chicklet’s testing just didn’t add up.
Basically, Chicklet scored very high in certain areas, while simultaneously scoring low in others, and there was no discernible explanation.
At that time, Mrs. H was very aligned with my concerns and agreed that if pandemic life hadn’t thrown us for a loop, she would have pulled Chicklet in for an unofficial evaluation to put her own expert eyes and ears on our girl, and give us some better advice on how to move forward.
But since that wasn’t possible at the time, Mrs. H instead gave me some tips and online/subscription resources to utilize throughout the summer as I worked with Chicklet, so we wouldn’t lose more time while on break.
And we agreed to re-evaluate at the start of the new school year.
The Build-Up
Little did we know at the time, when we broke for summer, just how long-reaching the effects of the pandemic would be.
And, of course, the new school year launched in Fall of 2020 with all of my babies still underfoot for required distance learning—with no ability, yet, for in-person evaluation.
Having seen very little progression from my girl over the summer, I forced the ball to keep rolling and waited a very “patient” two weeks into the school year before I circled back with all of the necessary parties to keep the ball rolling.
I’ll never forget the day Chicklet’s new first grade teacher conducted her own evaluation via Zoom. I monitored from another room, where Chicklet couldn’t see or hear me. And the whole thing absolutely brought me to tears.
I witnessed my bright, beautiful girl, as she was given words or sentences or picture cues on the screen, and when she was directed to read as she was able, she wove the most elaborate and fantastical stories for her teacher. All completely made up, without the use of a single word on the screen.
And when she completed the evaluation and logged off of Zoom, and I asked her how it went, she lit up and said, “great!”
I immediately went down to the hubby (who was working from home, of course), closed the study doors, and just sobbed.
I cried because of the beautiful innocence of my girl and her ignorance of anything amiss.
I cried because of the incredible world that existed inside her head, and for her ability to craft such creative stories, sometimes as an adaptive mechanism.
And I cried because my concerns for her reading abilities were already deep-rooted, and I worried about the day she would become self-aware enough to know that other children were reading actual words on a page and she wasn’t (yet). What if we couldn’t identify a way to help her by then???
After that evaluation, Chicklet’s sweet and encouraging homeroom teacher—in conjunction with the glorious Mrs. H—agreed that we would only wait until we had one additional round of benchmark testing as a final data point (just in the unlikely case Chicklet was a late-reading bloomer, as so many kiddos are), and then she’d be happy to push toward a more official process for our girl, should it be warranted.
Enter: THE MOST DIFFICULT STRETCH of virtual schooling I experienced during the whole pandemic.
Week after week, I worked with Chicklet daily on every one of her assignments.
I observed, analyzed and theorized until my eyes crossed, and more and more of my personal opinions were pointing toward dyslexia.
Examples…
The task of writing out the numbers 1-20:
My poor girl could complete it perfectly one day, and then the next, her numbers would appear backwards and/or transposed.
21 instead of 12.
A backwards 9 that looked like a P.
I was pouring all of my energy into guidance and repetition, but we still couldn’t master certain things.
And writing out words phonetically…man, oh man. It was an incredibly triggering task for Chicklet, and even when she tried her best, she was wide off the mark.
Not only were her letters or entire words written backwards, she had such difficulty with translating the sounds as she heard them on to a piece of paper.
Honestly, it was often fascinating to interpret things she’d written during this time. All too often, I marveled at the way she interpreted the sounds, and I felt like Sherlock cracking a case any time I translated something properly.
But we kept on.
I spent such a concentrated amount of time with her, sounding out her words, offering her encouragement, support, assistance, snuggles or tough love as I felt it was needed.
And day after day after day, it was such a challenge to make it through the reading components of her school work. So much, that it often left me in tears—yet again. (Of course, behind closed doors where Chicklet could never see me.)
Because I felt such sorrow and failure for not being able to better help my girl with her struggles while we were playing the waiting game.
In fact, I nearly broke for good, a few weeks into that Fall 2020 semester, when Chicklet, herself, finally reached her own breaking point.
It was the anxiety over virtual spelling tests that finally put her over the edge.
During the first couple of tests that school year, when the teacher would speak the words via Zoom to the kiddos, and give them a certain amount of time to write down their answers, my Chicklet would wind up in tears, log herself out of Zoom and come to find me, so emotional and overwhelmed because of the stress.
Of course, fast forward two years, and I know (all too well!) that standard spelling tests are such a challenging task for dyslexia students. But back then, I only knew that Chicklet was overwhelmed and shutting down. And that only furthered my drive to get to the root of my girl’s troubles.
Thankfully, our waiting game proved fruitful and the next round of benchmark testing showed the same anomalies as before.
Mrs. H talked me through the results in such a detailed, thoughtful manner, and it was evident to both of us that the time had come:
We launched the official dyslexia evaluation sequence.
The Evaluation
Now.
As our kiddos attend a (wonderful) public elementary school, there are absolutely certain standard procedures that come into play when a parent is bringing a concern to a teacher’s attention, or a teacher themselves has flagged a problem, shown to be consistent over time.
And the first step to this lengthy protocol is RTI: Response to Intervention.
Basically, after the child has been flagged for any number of issues within a wide variety of subjects, an RTI protocol can be put into place for a period of one month. And that protocol involves the child’s homeroom teacher providing additional attention and support to the child, within the regular course of the school day, 4 times a week.
So we placed Chicklet into an RTI protocol, but Mrs. H—being the brilliant advocate that she is—recommended simultaneously proceeding with the next step of the process. Which is an official psychological evaluation of the kiddo, coupled with any necessary testing, to be conducted by an educational diagnostician. In this case, a specialist in dyslexia evaluation.
And holy mother of a whole new world did this end up being!
Because any time this type of evaluation comes into play, the child is protected under special education laws within the state, and the amount of paperwork and red tape involved can be quite daunting.
I’m not gonna lie…on the day I received the pages upon pages of documents establishing Chicklet’s rights as a “special needs” student, I sort of lost it (yet again).
I reminded myself at the time that labels and legalities didn’t matter. This was all about advancing any sort of official diagnosis for my kiddo and providing her with the best educational help she could get.
But it was tough.
As a parent, I just didn’t want to put her in any sort of box. I’ve long defied any labels or stereotyping of my children and their behavior, and this felt like nails on a chalkboard in my soul to read words on a form that just didn’t compute with my kid.
But I powered through. And the hubby soothed me when I cried. And we focused on the end goal.
And thus...another waiting period began.
Though at this point, at least we were fortunate enough to send the kiddos back to in-person schooling (thank the heavens!), so the ongoing evaluations could be conducted live and in person.
Unfortunately, since the world was still amidst pandemic upheaval and all of the school district’s psychologists and diagnosticians were playing catch-up for all the kiddos in line for testing during the virtual schooling time period, our wait was a bit longer that it might have been otherwise.
Chicklet made it in under the wire and completed her evaluations prior to the Christmas 2020 holiday break (and was none the wiser about what any of these evaluations were for or about), and it was January 2021 when the official report came in.
A Diagnosis
The day I was emailed the very lengthy and complex report from the diagnostician and read the word “dyslexic,” I broke down I tears.
(Are we sensing JUST HOW MANY tears were involved in this process?? Ha.)
But these were tears of RELIEF!
Tears of joy, even, over finally—at long last—confirming what we likely knew about our girl in our gut, many years ago.
She. Is. DYSLEXIC.
Immediately, I began pouring over all the research I could get my hands on. I even gleefully powered through all the ensuing red tape (I mean, talk about formalities!),
More paperwork, review committees, official, official, official. I didn’t care! It meant my girl was finally on the full and complete track toward getting the reading intervention she desperately needed and I was GRATEFUL.
I just shed a ton of gratitude tears for a solid weekend, ha. I released so many pent-up emotions and stressors—I was just so grateful to have made it to the point of this diagnosis.
There was not then, nor has there ever been in all the time since, a moment of sadness over this end result.
Only relief.
Intervention & Progress
From the moment of the official diagnosis (well, if I’m being honest, it began much sooner, because Mrs. H is an aforementioned ANGEL) Chicklet began her fantastic, daily dyslexia intervention.
During an unobtrusive time of the day, Chicklet—along with a handful of other dyslexic students from her grade—head to Mrs. H’s classroom for their specialized hour of work.
It’s a comprehensive, cumulative, sequential program that includes all sorts of amazing, multi-sensory work.
Each of her daily lessons focus on alphabet sequence, decoding, fluency, phonemic awareness, spelling and/or comprehension skills. And believe me when I tell you: IT FREAKING WORKS.
Mrs. H follows an accredited, national curriculum, and not only is she a district-award-winning teacher, she’s a parent to several children herself, one of whom is dyslexic.
In case I haven’t said it enough, let me say it again: SHE IS A GODSEND.
I’m pretty sure I got weepy the very first time we “met” during lockdown via phone. And I’ve cried all sorts of tears in my phone and in-person conversations with her since. Many of them, HAPPY tears!
It’s an absolute, ongoing love fest, all around, between her, myself and Chicklet. She is the most positive force, who believes to her core that dyslexia is a gift, and I can’t begin to convey in words how important she’s been to our family throughout this process.
The best part is that Mrs. H is Chicklet’s official dyslexia “case” representative within the school. And she’s also the one to place Chicklet in her specific class each year. So I can always rest easy, knowing my girl is going to be with the absolute BEST teacher to advance her growth.
Like last year—which turned out to be an incredibly pivotal year for Chicklet’s development.
It was tough at times (as I know it will be again, many times to come), but Chicklet was in such solid homeroom hands, with a fantastic teacher, hand-selected by Mrs. H. And my beloved girl blossomed under such devoted care and attention.
If ever there was a post to sum up the challenges and triumphs of last school year, it’s this one: My Girl With Grit. Read (or re-read) it and marvel at the fact that Chicklet’s dyslexia was in play throughout all of it, and you didn’t even know it!):
Onward and Upward
After allllllll of the above (if you’re still with me and reading this!), you can probably emphasize with my weepy emotions in church last Sunday—not to mention, my pride in Chicklet’s INCREDIBLE summer reading!
I mean, if I took one pic of her nose in a book these past few months, I took thousands. With good reason!
Chicklet’s ah ha! reading moment finally arrived! With gusto! Though, to be fair, it was a thousand small victories building steadily upon one another, day after day, week after week, month after month. And my girl did ALL the work.
So…what happens now??
Dyslexia is not something to outgrow.
It is simply a beautiful part of an individual’s neurological makeup—and will influence all areas of Chicklet’s life and learning, in ways we’ll continually uncover.
But one thing’s certain: with the proper ongoing intervention and education (which Chicklet will receive through fifth grade, followed up with tailored accommodations from that point forward), she will grow to be a superstar reader, I have no doubt.
I mean…she’s already well on her way!
One final story that had me smiling like a fool:
A few days ago, I was chatting with Chicklet after school, learning more about her dyslexia group and whether or not it had changed for the year (it’s consistently been about five kiddos in her grade).
I spent some time asking about the current status of some of her little buddies—not so I could evaluate other kiddos, but so I could gauge Chicklet’s own sense of self and comfort in relation to her peers.
“And how is [so and so] doing?”
“Good.” She gave a serious nod. “Slow but steady wins the race.”
Ugh. I loved this answer. She even mimicked hand motions I know Mrs. H has used when reaffirming students.
“And how is [so and so] doing?” I kept going through her list of little classmates.
“Fine. Good,” she replied again.
“And how do you think you’re doing?”
No pause. No reaction, whatsoever. Straight-faced as you please:
“I’m soaring.”
Soaring indeed, my beloved girl.
Soaring, INDEED.
If you’re still with me allllll the way to the end, here…thanks for taking the time to read about my Chicklet and her unique path to reading.
Dyslexia is a fascinating part of more lives than you can imagine, and I encourage you to read up on it, if you’re so inclined.
Or ask my girl the next time you see her, and she’ll tell you all about her magical brain—and maybe even bust out this prototype she made in school on Friday:
Ask for specifics, and she might even show you her “dyslexia part.” ;)
Happy Saturday Before My Birthday, peeps!
(And, yes, in case you’re wondering: living through this HEA story—and the victories that have come along with it—is the BEST pre-bday gift!)
Over and out.
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