This was my view as I planned a menu a couple of weeks ago. Nothing particularly special, just a kid doing their science. Except that it was the first day Naomi had done her science on her own. Ever. The following week was the first time she did a whole week's worth of science on her own. Ever.
I don't really give a rip when a kid starts reading well. Barring a learning disability, all kids eventually get it and I've never met a single person whose life was forever changed because they started reading at 3. Or 5. Or 10.
So when Naomi struggled to read I just figured she was just one of those kids who took a while for it to click. Yes, she knew her letters and their sounds. Yes, she new how to read. But it took a lot of work for her to get through a whole sentence, paragraph, or page. She definitely was not reading with the same skill as her older brothers had at the same age (that's fine because they're each their own person, but they were my reference point), would often guess at words, and was resourceful enough to look around the page for contextual clues when she got stuck on a word.
Somewhere around kindergarten or first grade I wondered if she was dyslexic or had vision problems, but I realized she was still well within the normal range of reading skills and decided to just let her blaze her own trail. We'd take things at whatever pace she needed them to be, which meant I was doing all her school work, except math, with her for years past when the big boys were working independently. Time consuming and inconvenient? Sure, but that was fine. It's what she needed and so it's what we did.
Then she got a tic over the summer. At least that's what it looked like. It was something new and odd, a facial behavior she was oblivious to until I secretly made a video of her doing it. We decided to get her eyes checked because the only time the tic thing appeared was when she was reading a book or at the computer. Anything else, like brain tumors or something, would have made the tic happen any old time.
Sure enough, she needed glasses. It figures that the one time I decided to be all go with the flow was the one time I should have been my usual Type A, get the job done self. Oh well. What's done is done.
She's not the first W to need glasses, but it wasn't blog-worthy before because the vision problems weren't debilitating. This time was different. Now this girl of mine is picking up the pace in the reading department. She's not reading huge chapter books on her own yet, and that's totally fine, but she is doing her science independently, along with some other parts of her school work. It's pretty awesome to see her progress over the last two months!
What's funny is that she's wanted glasses for a really long time purely for cosmetic reasons. This is the same girl who punched out the lenses of some cheap sunglasses before we went on a run one day in the hopes that people would think she was wearing real glasses with black rims. She thinks glasses look awesome, so this was like a dream come true. Bonus points for the fact she got pink ones. In a purple case. It doesn't get much better than that!
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