Andy has finished all of his testing for learning disabilities and we had the meeting this past Thursday. It was very interesting. Basically, Andy does not qualify for special education, but has qualified for a 504 plan, which is sort of a limited special education plan. The psychologist wasn't concerned at all about Andy's intellectual abilities. She said that he did very well on the testing in all areas, except spelling, which she said was really atrocious. His reading comprehension and fluency is excellent, and better than most of the kids his age, and she was very surprised about this because usually when a kid shows a problem with spelling, it also shows up in their reading -- they either have very low fluency, or their comprehension is poor, or both. She said that the strange thing about Andy is that his spelling is the ONLY problem that surfaced through the testing.

They told me that Andy doesn't qualify for special education, but that since there was a definite problem with the spelling, they were going to implement a special spelling program with Andy's classroom teacher. For the next two quarters (to see how it works) they will be giving Andy a special spelling list and will be working with him on learning the rules of spelling more explicitly than he has before. At the end of the two quarters, they will test him again to see if there is any improvement, and if there is, life is good. If there is no improvement, they will use the data to implement a special ed program for Andy that focuses on spelling only.

One of the other thing that came up is that they want Andy to use mechanical pencils instead of regular ones because he grasps the pencil very tightly. They want him to exercise his hand in ways that increases the hand and finger sensitivity to what it is grasping so that he can relax while he is writing.

The other section of the testing that was a little worrisome was the working memory test. In this test, they were checking to see if Andy could hold a group of numbers or letters in his memory long enough to do something with them. This is the second stage of memory (had a long chat about this with the psychologist who focused on neurological testing who lives next door), out of three stages. The first stage is the short term memory for stuff that you only have to hold on to for a few seconds. The second stage is the working memory which is where most of your "stuff" that you need all the time is stored. What is in this area includes information like your homework assignments and locker combinations and things like that. Beyond the working memory is the long term memory, and only some things get put away in this section. Andy's working memory is profoundly poor. He scored an 80 on this test, which translates to being at the 9th percentile for his age group for working memory. What this means practically is that we are going to have to work hard to keep Andy organized and work on strategies to help him remember all the stuff that he is going to have to keep on deck when he is in school. I am so grateful that my neighbor is in the profession she is -- she can not only explain stuff to me, but she can also give me some tips on attempting to fix the problems that are there. (She gives a great Halloween party too!)

All in all, I am fairly satisfied with this whole thing. I am happy that they did the testing, and it is always nice to see it confirmed that you have a very smart kid, and I am really happy that the issue is limited to something that is relatively fixable and limited to a small area of his academic career. However, it doesn't look like Andy is going to have the easiest time in school. There will be areas that he will have difficulty with and what I am hoping is that we can figure out some things to do so that he can get around these problems before it becomes something that we have to deal with in high school and college.

In other news, Andy was asked to be an altar server at church. He was thrilled about this. I was a little sick at the thought. However, he went through the training last week and served his first Mass tonight. It went very smoothly and many of the ladies at church came up to me after Mass and told me how well he did. Andy was pretty calm about the whole thing -- he wasn't flustered at all!

I am sorry about how blurry the picture is -- this is the best picture we got.

Redford and Charlie are finally starting to enjoy each other's company! They aren't exactly playing together, but they are spending some time together, as you can see from this picture.


We celebrated Brigid's birthday this week. When I asked her what she wanted to have for her birthday dinner, Brigid replied that she wanted salad dressing chicken, Kraft macaroni and cheese (specified because she didn't want my home-made macaroni and cheese), and rainbow cake. So that is what I made. How on earth does Kraft stay in business?? That macaroni and cheese was disgusting! Absolutely gross! And almost no flavor to boot! However, the guys loved it and so did Brigid. I made the rainbow cake too, and it came out very nicely. The cake, of course, was terrific.