Zoe's fifteen minutes

I took the kids to the local pumpkin patch today (technically, it's a church yard with a bunch of pumpkins trucked in, but there are no actual pumpkins growers nearby; this is the best we can do). It's always fun, running around looking at all the options, checking out the decorations, and so on, concluding with loading a couple of gourds in a wagon and hauling them to our car. This time, though, there was also a photographer from the local paper. He got my permission to set Zoe up for a photo op with a six-month-old. The baby was very good, just sat there among the pumpkins, smiling and looking cute. Zoe was also good at looking cute, not so good at holding still and facing the camera. Eventually he got a shot he was happy with, and he took down her name, so Zoe may just get her picture in the paper. Once Nick understood what was going on, he was JEALOUS! With about that intensity. He usually hates having his picture taken, but apparently it's different when it's for the paper. I kept having to chase him out of the shot and prevent him from messing up the photos in one way or another. Dude's just not as little and cute as his sister, though I managed to refrain from pointing that out.

Nick's evening wasn't all bad; he came away with an enormous pumpkin and a weird little novelty pumpkin that he named "Green Rocket Pumpkin". And a stop at Wallyworld finally yielded a coat he liked. I should mention that fall has arrived in Louisiana; it's been cold for a week or so. Temps have been down in the 40s and 50s some days when we leave for school. And I hear you northerners snickering, but he didn't have a jacket. None! So he's been cold every morning, and I'd taken him several places to try things on, but nothing was acceptable. (Except the $70 Carhartt at Bass Pro. That was not happening.) It was getting frustrating. So yay! he has a soft, thick, camoflage coat that exactly fits his exacting specifications. Moral: next time, we go to Walmart first. 

In other news, because I really feel like I should toss some of this out here: Nick got straight As on his first quarter report card. We're all very proud. We had a teacher conference, and we agreed that at this point, our main worry is that we're waiting for the other shoe to drop, because he is not acting like a boy with dyslexia. He's keeping up with the reading, his comprehension is good, his writing is showing clear improvements from the start of the year (and dramatic improvements from last year*); he's not having any problems at all. In math class, where I'd been concerned that he would be bored, Nick whips through his work, then helps the other kids! He's still not making any friends, but the other kids all seem to like him fine, and he doesn't seem too upset, so I'm willing to wait on further developments. On a related note, homework is much smoother and less painful experience than last year.

And Nick is receiving extra help. We finally had the IEP meeting a couple weeks ago. I say finally, but as these things go, I think it was pretty speedy. There were a lot of people there - it was nice to see so many people working with us. The upside of it all was that Nick does not technically meet the parish's stringent definition of "learning disabled", primarily because - this is fabulous -  he is reading at grade level. Seriously. He's REPEATING first grade, this is his SECOND YEAR of first grade, but because his reading tested out at about where kids should be after six weeks of first grade, he's not learning disabled. At least everyone in the room had the grace to look embarrased when this was explained to us. I know why the parish does this: if they don't admit he's learning disabled, they aren't legally required to provide assistance or accomodations. Since they're doing so anyway, I'm willing to let it go for now. This will, of course, change should the situation warrant it. First, he's getting pulled out of class several times a week for Literacy Lab, just like last year, only now the specialist knows to change up some of his material to be more dyslexic specific. He's also getting pulled to work with someone who specializes in learning disabilities and can give him more focused assistance with his reading strategies. And he's still going to speech therapy, so the poor kid misses a lot of the fun parts of school to go do all this stuff. As far as accomodations go, the main one right now is that his teacher sometimes reads his tests aloud when she expects the other kids to read it themselves. Depending on what the test is, of course, and a lot of them are read aloud to everybody at this point. 

*Last year's journal entries typically consisted of laborious copying of the beginning of a sentence off the board, followed by one or two words, barely comprehensible at best. This year, the writing is neater, the conclusions are longer and easily read, and he has time left over to add an illustration. Example: "If I could have any hat, it would be _a mgick hat_." Below which is a nice drawing of his Hogwart's hat and wand.