night and day

just different...

Linda Silverman was explaining at a lecture that I was at recently that gifted persons are more different from one another than one average person is from another.... I thought that little tid bit rather interesting... how do they go about "proving" this, let alone "discovering" this...

She explained it makes categorizing them in little cliques rather impossible...

yesterday I saw yet another example of how my kids are so different.

compatible, but different.

Some similarities are that they both gifted, and both have their "issues" and would most likely be labeled "twice exceptional" because of these issues.... One issue they both have is vision tracking, though that is where the similarity stops. HOW the tracking issue manifests is different, what sort of therapy each of them needs to correct their issue is... different... how bad the vision is for each of the is... different... and how it manifests itself in everyday life is... you guessed it ... different... so the only thing the same is that they both have some sort of eye muscle/visual tracking issue.

Yesterday they both started an art class. Taught by another home school mom, who is an art teacher. One child loved it! Loved the drawing big, the cluing, cutting, painting, learning about design, elements, color, really felt free with her brush. This was my daughter. She told me she would love to have paper as big as the room, many different brushes and walk barefoot just painting!

This distressed my son. who likes to draw, but with a pencil, small pictures, not large. Not with a paint brush, not with paint. Not with big strokes, broad strokes... He found the whole experience frustrating... He really liked the teacher. He really liked the other kids. He was glad no one was mad when he sprayed them all with paint on accident, trying TOO hard to BE broad with his stroke...

What went wrong? Why was he actually "frustrated"...? It is one thing to NOT be an artist, another to be actually "frustrated".

I prayed about it, and asked questions, and decided it was the fact that his eyes jump, they dart, and he was always drawing in his comfort zone. This nice new teacher was asking him to step out of his comfort zone. His eyes couldn't track that brush and what it was doing, and it was stressful to him, it took sooo much energy to focus on the tip of that brush, he was spent, exhausted, wiped out.

Yet my God is good, all the time, and He had my day planned in such a way that I had BEEN frustrated ALL day. After art class was the chiropractor/therapist (who does occupational/physical & some vision therapy with my children) and then off to the eye doctor at Costco. It would be a crazy, traffic laden afternoon, one I was dreading!

I told the therapist about his dislike for the "large painting project" the problem with the broad strokes, and she pondered this, asking him questions about what those movements were exactly... and altered his therapy after discovering some significant issues not noticed previously... Praise God. At the eye doctor we discovered his eyes were worse. My husband who met us there, asked why, why are they worse every time we come? The answer... His muscles are weak, and cross when he focuses on anything like a word or anything, that is why two different scripts, that is why bifocals. I asked, what about Vision therapy? She looked confused....

I don't want to bash my wonderful Costco Optical Dr. Frankly she is terrific. She is however like most in her field, not willing to tell us to go for therapy, to work out those muscles, to learn how... rather than just have another script and watch our sons eyes get worse and worse and worse.

We brought our daughter in a while ago, but she passed the tests at Costco... Her "vision" was fine. Its ONLY her tracking that is bad. Glasses won't help her, and so it seems to me, the therapy they are getting is great, but at some point we MAY need to see a real live, in person Vision Therapist! What do you think?

Oh and their paint wheel.... One is all gloppy, a huge mess (his) and one is perfectly pretty, numbered and everything (hers), utterly different, utterly night, and day....