Dreamer of dreams,born out of my due time, Why should I strive to set the crooked straight. Wm Morris

[indignatio]

Hopefully the link from the other thread will work

My stats

ds is 4.5 - summer born
In reception class

Has issues with:-
Easy distractability (school work and practical tasks)
Concentration problems when not totally engaged by something (95% of the time)
Fidgeting
Getting "lost" in the middle of a complicated sentence/explaination.
Bossy manner
Isolation at school
Poor eye contact
Repetition of sentences until he hears the acknowledgement
No herding instinct

On the positive
Very loving boy
Exceptional reader for his age
Good at maths
Lots of "home" friends
If gripped by something, can concentrate on it for ages

dx:
teacher initially thought he might have dyspraxia - no longer thinks so.
I consider that he has more add traits, but would not go so far as to say he has add.
SENCO to informally assess him next week and then meeting to be arranged with parents, teacher and senco shortly thereafter.

Not sure what else I should put in.

Can i have a tiny proud Mummy moment? Dt1 cycled for the first time with no stablisers a couple of weeks and and I have marvelled at his speed for 2 weeks. Dt2 decided to have a go today and i was convinced that he would fall straightaway. However He DID it , albeit a bit wobbly but pretty similiar to Dt1's first day. He wasnt at all happy because he couldnt do it as well as Dt1. He hadnt seen Dt1 on his first day so I think he assumed that he could just take off at speed. I am really proud of him and feel confident that he will be much improved within a short space of time. I know its not a dreamy issue but one of the issues the teacher raised was his balance which i didnt really think was all that bad and it cant really be can it if he can write a bike at 5.75yrs. Not really young but surely within the norm? I cant wait for DT2 to tell the teacher!

Wow! Well done both DTs. DS1 only mastered the bike at 7. DS2, whom I don't have the same sort of worries about, only learned to pedal with stabilisers at 5.

DS1 is exactly like Bink's DS when it comes to fingers - he is positively feral when eating unless we bark commands at him. And, like Castles' DS, he is very slow unless he likes it - so pasta and pizza disappear in no time.

That's fantastic Maggiems! DS1 learnt with stabilisers at 5, but at nearly 6 still seems to find pushing the pedals an incredible effort - we have to give him a helping push on even the smallest incline. Hasn't had much practice though .

The fingers thing rings many bells here also...meal times are often a bit fraught here abd I think I need to lay off DS1 a bit - but at the same time I want him to be able to eat in public without putting everyone else off their food!

Thanks - took him out again this morning and hes going great. Really proud of himself until he fell at the end and now has a grazed knee and elbow! SO pleased. Thought he wasnt going to do it until at least next year and whilst I want worried about that at all its nice to see him do something earlier than I expected. I need a new bike now!

Oh congratulations Maggie!! - and we all here know exactly how big an achievement that is. Fantastic!

ds is 8 now, and still no bike-riding - though where we live you have to make a deliberate effort to get the bike out & find a place to practice & I've been lazy about that. But you have given me a spur - also in the last few months he's got completely competent on a scooter: you can now see him using shifting his balance to do things, & this week he's worked out how to swap feet on the footplate without touching the ground. So I think we have some progress.

Thanks Bink. Glad your Ds is making progress too. There is no way I would have tried Dt2 without stablizers if it hadnt been for dt1. I really didnt think he was ready. Dt2 had also become very confident with his scooter in recent times so maybe your Ds is on his way too.

Congrats to maggiems's Dt2! I was thinking today that I need to buy DS (5) a bike as I have no idea if he can ride one or not. He doesn't appear to have gross motor problems, I just don't know All the children seem to have scooters around here, my DCs included.

I'm a bit depressed - my dd is 8 and can't ride a bike. I think she gets it into her head that there are some things she can't do or isn't good at, and she won't even try. Most of her class are at a rounders club tonight, but she refuses to go because she can't catch/doesn't know which hand to hold the bat in etc. I've tried telling her she'll get better if she practises, but she isn't really interested.

Just sticking my head round the corner, I posted about my DD on the other thread I think when I was Kittypickle.

Congratulations to your ds Maggiems, that's brilliant

My DD is mind boggling messy when she eats, her fingers gets in the way then she rubs the food into her hair. It was after a medusa moment that I decided it was time she went back to OT for another session. They suggested that occasionally we put a mirror in front of her so she can see what she is doing when she eats. Haven't done this yet but I might.

Babygrand, DD is way off riding a bike without stabilizers if that is any consolation. She asked DH to take them off at the weekend and they were back on in 5 minutes. DH is thinking about looking into one of those attachement bike things that go on the back of your bike.

Next personality-trait poll: do your dreamers have a way of making unexpected connections between ideas, so you say "I'd never thought of it like that before - but yes, absolutely, you're right"?

Ds and I have these wonderful chats on the school run (which is Tube & walk, so lots of time for talking) - every day a new idea pops up. Today we gave some money to a Samaritans collector, and I explained what they did as a charity. Ds said chirpily "You're going to ask me about RE aren't you?" I asked what he meant, and he told me he's doing "Jewish and Christian parables" at school - so clearly he'd made a neat little connection in his mind and was waiting for me to do the same.

Yesterday's was even funnier - he saw an ad for a lifetime mobile contract (£15 a month for ever) and asked whether you have to agree right away or whether you're allowed to get your calculator & work out if it was a good idea - so we got straight on to consumer credit law & "cooling off" periods. Everything's like that - something sparks him off and you end up bouncing rather laterally from idea to idea. It's lovely.

Your DS sounds so lovely! I know what you mean - though DS1's thinking is not so much lateral as tangential - I often have to search very hard for the connection .

We do have similar conversations to your second one - but mostly the leaps are made by me. Yesterday we went from tomatoes to dinosaur bones in 3 easy moves.

Ds will suddenly come out with a question relating to a conversation we have had several days/weeks previously. It is as if his brain has just sorted through and processed the infomation and worked out where the gaps are.

My DS is the same though he's younger than some of yours and also less mature linguistically. Yesterday he was asking me about university (as I was wearing a pair of DH's old tracky bottoms with a logo on them) and before I knew it he was talking about the "spinning globe" at the start of some dvd or other and Universal. When I looked at him quizically, he explained the similarities between university and universal to his daft mum!

They all sound so lovely to me btw.

I'm not sure about the lateral thinking. We certainly have obsessive thinking and talking. And we have the conversational starters out of nowhere.

About 18 months ago, when DS1 was nearly 7, we went to Paris. Standing on top of the Eiffel Tower, his sensible mature girl cousin of a similar age was asking if we could see the Arc de Triomphe from there. I asked DS1 what he was looking at and he said, "I was thinking about Dr. Who when Rose was hanging off the barrage balloon and wondering if it was as high as this and what it would feel like and if I was hanging off a barrage balloon and there were bombs going off what would..........."(continue ad nauseam until at bottom of Eiffel Tower considering lunch options).

I love Bink's DS totting up the monthly payment plan.

That's interesting about littler ones' leaps being harder to follow - that was our experience too, I realise - I used to say that talking to ds was like doing cryptic crossword clues (kind of fun, but tricky for anyone who didn't know what he was likely to be on about).

And it's made me realise that progress has happened: he can now see where he's gone cryptic, and have a go at explaining his links - hence the gentle prompt about RE. I suppose it's a development about understanding other people's minds (& that they don't automatically know what you know - that very central issue).

I think can see that happening gradually with DS1 - he now remembers much more often to explain the context of a remark rather than just leaping straight in. I've done a LOT of
work with him on this - explaining that people don't automatically know what he's on about and so he needs to put in an introductory sentence. It does mean that we sometimes get " Mum, I'm going to explain to you now that..." and " I'm now going to change the subject, OK?"

As far as conversational connections go, he is v similar (again) to your DS, Castles. The comment about Universal / University - we get a lot of that sort of thing. I love it - keeps me on my toes!

I think he may have met a kindred spirit at school - a little girl we met in the library last week who's in his class. They had a very intense and slightly off the wall conversation while
her mother and I looked on bemusedly

Why
do my posts
keep doing
this?

Thanks Sphil and pleased to hear my DS is once again not unique! His fascination with the written word appears to be is extending verbally, thankfully. I just had a call from his speech therapist who visited him in school today and she said the main area of concern is him copying (bad) language of other children and sometimes annoying them. It choked me a bit. Why I don't know as it has always been my main area of concern. At least we can concentrate on that now. It's his little way of fitting in Not wishing to sound smug and I hope you'll all understand, she said his reading is "amazing" for a 5 year old. I have these proud moments frequently but I'm usually brought down to earth pretty quickly

So pleased your DS has found a friend Sphil. It must be such a relief.
And sorry, no
idea why this
is happening!

Castles - enjoy your proud mummy moment and revel in it

We get the rose /balloon/Dr Who type comments quite often

Good news here - ds's teacher has decided that he has actually integrated into the class and does not need lessons in how to get on with others. Interestingly the shy kids in the class are now (during this last week) really coming out of their shells. It is as if they (and ds) have finally weighed up the risk involved in being part of the class and decided that it is worth it.

Do any of your Ddreamers tell you (when you have been in the room with them) exactly what has just been said to them - as if they don't think that you could have possibly heard as the conversation wasn't actually directed at you ?

sphil
no
idea
sorry

Yes indignatio, all the time

I wonder how our ddreamers would get on if they were all in the same room together?

Well that is weird - the lines on my last post have all resolved themselves into normal type [spooky emoticon]

Castles - I wish we could arrange a meet-up - I'd love to see if they got on together!

Indignatio - your comment about 'weighing up the risk' of joining in really hit home - I can see DS1 doing just this since starting his new school, though I hadn't thought about it that way until I read your post. Atm the girls obviously pose much less of a risk. He is clearly dying to join in the games of tag that the boys play in the morning before school, but doesn't quite have the courage yet. At his old school he 'took the risk' by the end of Reception, so I think it might be a while yet. In fact, I think it's a good thing in his situation - he's observing the other kids (and has already worked out who the 'naughty' ones are) and deciding who he'd like to be friends with, rather than leaping in and attaching himself to the first person who's friendly.

re a meet up - roughly were are we all ? Would this be possible ?

I am on the surrey/hants border - London easy for me in the summer hols

I'm in Somerset, nr Taunton atm but will be near Glastonbury from the summer.

Dr Who exhibition Cardiff?
Star Wars exhibition London?

Star wars vote here - where is it on in London ? Will NEED to do that over the summer hols anyway !!