So Spring finally showed up in Michigan and let all the peoples rejoice. There were times this Winter when I wondered if it would ever come, if we had stumbled upon some George Martin-esque Winter where White Walkers roamed the earth and babies froze to death in their cradles.
We've been making great strides in our little palace, touching up paint, remaking our bedroom, building raised beds for my glorious garden. Well. I supervised and provided inspiration and moral support. My dear husband built them and drank beers. We have also been trying to keep a certain little Miss occupied since she's left the preschool. In jest (and when she's elsewhere) we refer to her as the preschool dropout. Dano worked dutifully on the Princess Letter Flashcards we'd made Lilah and she had nearly all of them down. She had many playdates and lots of cousin time. We took her to her formal special education evaluation that had already been set up with the school district. I was made to wait outside while the speech pathologist and occupational therapist took Lilah and Caroline into the "exam room" (i.e. room filled with toys and fun things to do) and started "testing" (i.e. playing) with her. It took a really long time but I heard a lot of praise and laughter. I kept leaning toward the door to eavesdrop. Dano kept hauling me away and telling me to knock it off.
At the end, they turned Lilah loose to play in the room and talked us through their assessment. I was pretty impressed with how thoroughly they'd tested her while keeping her laughing and engaged. The occupational therapist said Lilah was on the low end of normal fine motor development. She held a pencil correctly with only minor verbal correction and her grip and pressure were appropriate. She could draw a person with recognizable parts and colored even though Lilah didn't act like she loved doing it (she doesn't). They noticed a very faint tremor in her hands after working for awhile, so suggested some muscle-strengthening exercises to try over the summer. The only part of the motor assessment she failed was when the therapist build a simple structure out of blocks and asked Lilah to replicate it, Lilah went freestyle and built a castle. When asked, "Does yours look like mine?" Lilah nodded yes but commented that hers was better.
Typical, I thought.
The speech pathologist had a little more to say. She said they'd started out by just having a nice conversation about Lilah's birthday party in Chicago the week before. She'd gone into amazing detail about riding the train, going to the American Girl Place, having lunch and a cake, getting to choose her very own doll whose name was Caroline. On and on. So she didn't have a lot of concerns when she went to test Lilah, but they'd started at the preliminary speech testing.
"Lilah bombed. Not just bombed, but didn't get a single question right and I was getting really worried." I'm sure I visibly went pale and felt myself shaking. "It didn't make any sense to me. There were four pictures and I'd ask her things like, 'Point to the one where the children are eating the cookies.' One would have children eating cake. Children baking cookies. Children eating cookies. Children slicing carrots. She'd just pick any old picture and move to the next one. I had just had this conversation in incredible detail with this child, but she was bombing my easiest tests." The standardized tests required her to do all of the levels in order to score it, so she moved on to the harder levels. Lilah Rose scored off the charts, in the high 90th percentiles, in following directions, sentence structure, speech relationships, sequencing, you name it. "I couldn't believe this kid. She was doing things my older elementary kids can't do yet, and doing them perfectly. But when we went back and retested the basic things, she bombed again. Honestly, I just don't think she cares about them. They're easy and boring, they don't challenge or interest her. She points to whatever so she can move on, and she smiles at me while she does it like she's hoping her charm will work to get her out of if. My gut feeling is everything she's doing poorly, she doesn't care about. Get her in a project-based learning environment and I think she'll thrive. Challenge her and get her interested and you'll see a whole different kid." I wasn't sure what to think.
"But what about the basic stuff she's not doing? We keep dragging her back to get her to do the basics, colors, shapes, numbers, letters but she is really resisting or acting like she forgets the minute we show her."
"I don't think this kid forgets anything. I think she's beyond that. She knows it, she knows you know it, and she doesn't feel like proving she knows it. Meet her where she's at and challenge her. She knows more than you think. If I'm totally wrong, we have her assessment done and can pick her up in kindergarten." Turns out, she wasn't wrong.
After lots of free play this Spring, Dano and I had some serious discussions about preparing her for school in a way that wouldn't jar her or feel too academic. I signed her up for a few week-long day camps to get her used to being gone for more days and longer hours. One thing we debated about was electronic use. EVERY child she's friends with has some sort of computer, iPhone, or tablet in the house they play on. Not only does Lilah not have those things, she's been deliberately shielded from them. She watches 30 minutes of TV a day on average, with the exception from a movie here or there. She never has computer time, and smart phones "are for grown ups only". The only tablet in the house is my e-reader and she does have a few book on there she goes through every so often. Although Dano and I thought we had made the best choice possible to raise a human child in the age of the cyborgs, we had been slapped in the face with reality on her kindergarten tour. We were informed that starting in kindergarten, there was a state-mandated computer proficiency test done on an iPad or PC in the classroom. My heart sank. So not only would she be singled out because of her weird brain, she'd be the only kid there who had never played on a smart device before. I watched kids at work go through an entire physical exam without ever making eye contact with the doctor examining them. Were they autistic? No. They were on their phones or game systems or tablets. 5 year old twins with their own iPads. 9 year old boys with their own smart phones. I hated it and swore it wouldn't be my kid. So here I was feeling like technology was being forced on us whether we liked it or not.
I went to Target to talk to a really sweet college-age girl about the tablets they had geared toward kids. I felt sick to my stomach, like a total sellout. She walked me through a few models and I explained the circumstances to her. She pointed me toward one called the Nabi. It was virtually indestructible. It came pre-loaded with a free Pre-K to 3rd grade curriculum that matched the Common Core Standards in public school, so the terminology and subject matter would be familiar once Lilah entered kindergarten. It was an Android tablet we could use for things like web surfing and skype in Parent Mode, but in the password-protected "Nabi Mode", it was Fort Knox. The only web sites she could access were the ones we pre-approved in Parent Mode. The fun games like puzzles and coloring could be put on a timer to power off after a predetermined amount of time. The educational lessons and quizzes and games would power off as well, but if she chose to play them over the fun games, she could earn 15 extra minutes of time a day. The device itself was put on a parent-controlled timer and was unusable between the hours of 8pm and 7am. At 7, it would wake her up with a song and a list of morning activities she had to complete, "Make my bed, get dressed, brush teeth, eat breakfast." After an accumulated hour of Nabi time or at 8pm, whichever came first, it would start yawning and telling her it was tired before going to "sleep" until the next day. We programmed her chore list into the Nabi where she could earn virtual coins to use in the "Treasure Chest" to buy new games or coloring sheets, or we could (and did) set them to earn zero coins so we could give her physical rewards in lieu of virtual ones.
What absolutely blew my mind was watching Lilah power through the education levels. Not only was she using between 25-35 minutes of Nabi time a day on average (nowhere near her hour time max), she was flying through levels in Wings Academy, the pre-programmed curriculum. If given a dozen eggs labeled with anything from upper or lowercase letters, asterisks, and just nonsense symbols and told to tap all the letters, Lilah got all the letters. When asked to tap only the lowercase letter e, she found all the e's. Every letter-related lesson, no issues. Upper and lower case, mixed in with wing dings and punctuation marks. She could spot the right letter every time. The numbers were a little more of a challenge because she couldn't recognize all of the numerals, but the math concepts she had down. Ordinal numbers, the concept of 100, counting by 10s to 100, counting past 10 into the teens. She could count in order to 30 and it was really easy for her to do simple problems like subtracting and adding within 5 as long as she had something visual or tangible to add or take away. Reading comprehension came easy for her, listening to a story read aloud by the Nabi and taking a quiz at the end. She's watching social studies and geography videos and quizzing at the end, doing awesome. I couldn't wrap my brain around her in the science category. The questions were asking things like "Would this marble sink in water? Why or why not?" And she's answering "Yes, because it has a higher density than the water." Cosmos is paying off, apparently.
Seeing her excel when challenged and allowed to progress and perform at her own pace in a stimulating environment makes me so happy, but also resentful. She missed her end of year picnic, preschool graduation, final field trip to a dairy farm. She isn't aware she's missing out, but I'm angry for her. Trying to let it go and realize that we (so very apparently, now) are doing right by our daughter, but some days it's easier than others. I'm fielding questions from her like "What are the stars' middle names?" and she's asking to stay up late and watch Mars rise. We're feeding her interests and stimulating her brain as best we can. With 5 years of good habits under her belt, it doesn't look like the Nabi will turn her into a cyborg. In fact, with heavily enforced limits and involvement on our part, it seems to be a powerful tool that actually allows her to control the pace of her home-based education.
