Some of the things I have learned...

Patience is a virtue that a mother of a child with learning issues must learn to not only develop but to hone and practice... DAILY.

Vacation:  Teachers are not teaching because of the vacation or because it is an easy pay check.  I was a classroom teacher first... I absolutely know this for a fact.  Teaching is physically, emotionally and mentally exhausting.. five days a week.  You wake up and go to sleep thinking about the child you can't reach or the one that you did.  You cry because you don't understand how anyone could do ___ to a child and justify it.  You see the kids in the grocery store and at the gym and in church.  Teaching is a way of life, not a job.  You do it because you love it.  

Cooler Heads:  Keeping this in mind, when your child struggles to learn in the way that the one teacher you seem to have every year, who will not work with your child, will help you not tear her head off when you have to point out; for the 12 time, that your child is supposed to have notes provided to him.  It also helps to type out that email... the one you wrote when you were on the 3rd hour of homework and headed for the 5th meltdown and send it to a friend not to the teacher.  Then retype that email the next morning when level heads prevail.  

Claws:  If your child is the one and only you have to struggle with to get through school and your child attends a large school, you are in luck.  You can show those momma bear claws a little more often and get accomplished what you need.  If you have 4 children, 3 of whom need understanding, you have to constantly figure out what the line is between supporting your first child and making sure you can show your face to that same teacher when the 4th child enters that same classroom, 10 years later.

Flexibility:  There are no right answers.  What is right for this child, this year, may not be what works for the same child the next.  It definitely will not be what works for another child.. no matter how much sense it made.  Each teacher understands things at a different level.  Learning to explain exactly what things are like for your child in many many ways will help each teacher better understand what they can do to help. 

Self-Confidence/Self Advocacy:  Quite honestly, the best and most important thing you can do to make sure your child succeeds is to make sure they understand a couple very important things.  First, they are absolutely perfect just the way they are.  Because they are not wired the same as most of the rest of their class makes them unique and amazing and you wouldn't want them any other way.  Just because they can perform well on one certain test does not mean they are not smart, it means they can't perform well on that test.  Second, they have the right to ask questions until they understand.  They can ask all the questions they need to get the page or the assignment or what ever they need to succeed.  If the teacher is not cooperative, then you will step in and make sure they do.   No matter what, you have their back.  

Heart Break

About a week ago, my heart broke. Teddy is our little bright light. He is energetic and outgoing and has the most adorable brown eyes that people have been falling for since he was a tiny baby. He has had a girlfriend since birth and women of all ages who just are totally enamored with him. He runs and plays and jumps on the trampoline and rides his bike and bangs things together... he is all boy. He has always been quick to pick things up and loves to figure out how to take things apart and figure out what makes them work. He builds with legos and blocks and train tracks and rocks and sticks... what ever he can find.

A couple weeks ago, he came home and told me I was going to be mad at him. I smiled and said, what did you do? He told me that when I went to parent teacher conferences his teacher was going to show me a paper he had done that he had gotten a "D" on. I asked him what happened for him to get a "D". He told me something about a classmate who had been making noise and that he hadn't heard it explained to him what he was supposed to do and so he did really bad. My heart broke. Up until this year, he has gotten checks on his grade card because he was making the progress expected for him or a plus if he was doing better than he needed to be. This year is the first year he is receiving grades and my little baby got a "D". He didn't want a "D". He wanted to keep getting good grades because he is trying his hardest. He wants to continue to feel like he is smart because he is; but he got a "D". I smiled and assured my little boy that just because he got a "D" on a paper, his mommy still knows he is smart and, as long as he tries, she will not be mad at him.

Teddy is 8 and has APD. He struggles to hear when there is back ground noise present. Teddy yells most of the time, I don't think he knows what it means to use an inside voice. He is not quite as unorganized as his big brother Ben, but close. You always know the last place he was because he just drops things where they leave his hand. Teddy is prosodic, but it shows differently than it does with Seth. He just dissolves when someone yells at him, he can't take it. The harsh tones are like physical blows to him. He also is the little guy who stands up for the kids in class who get picked on, loves frogs to death and wants to take care of every stray he finds.

Second diagnosis...

Ben, our second son, is a social butterfly and has been since birth. He repeated his first word at 4 months..."BOO". We didn't realize he was struggling until he was in middle school and had gone from one teacher who knew him well and worked with his short comings to 7 teachers who didn't. It was the same time when he went from A's and B's to D's and F's. It is also when we realized that in our household, APD was a hereditary issue passed down from father to sons. It was the year Ben was diagnosed with APD and we began recognizing symptoms in his then 4 year old brother.

Ben struggles with volume control. In trying to hear his own voice in his head like he should, he raises his voice above the level he should. What stands out in presentations for Ben are associative and output /organization. His short term memory is almost non-existent and always has been. Before we knew what was going on with him, we called him 'squirrel' because it was so easy to get him off task. Ben does not organize his personal space at all, at home at school... anywhere. To me, his space looks like his mind. Information goes in, but it is all over the place-unorganized. His key phrase for me is, "wait... what?" I know now that he says this when he is just not processing what is going on and needs it repeated or more time. My goal with Ben is to create a successful adult... school will be something we get through on the way there.

How is he doing now???

A lot has happened since that initial diagnosis. We now have four children; three boys and a girl. That 5 year old boy is 18 and in his first year of college. We have had two more children diagnosed with auditory processing disorder and I have, of course, developed quite a passion for the subject on how to help them. When our oldest was diagnosed, we had no idea how to proceed. We thought that his illnesses were the cause of his hearing problems and had no idea the ways in which an individuals brain is wired, affects the entirety of the person. Seth, our 18 year old, struggled socially all the way through school. The overwhelming presentation of APD for him is called prosodic. It impacts the way in which a person intakes language. While his brain is struggling to sort out all the sounds and make sense of what he is trying to hear, his brain does not process things like sarcasm or humor. He has misunderstood so many social interactions over the years that it has been a constant source of stress for him. He is getting better as he grows into an adult, but it is still hard. He also does not read other people's body language or pick up on social cues very well. Seth is working hard to learn to read body language, but he may always struggle with it.