Snow Day 2

Snow days are meant for sleeping in. Someone please inform Jake and Ara. I usually get up at 5:30 to start my day. At 5:28 Ara runs up the stairs yelling, "Holy Shit, school is closed again today". I respond with a sleepy "Alarms off" command. Then at 5:38 he's yelling up the stairs, "Essential personnel only". "What? Are you staying home?" No he was talking about school personnel and went to work. Then apparently he had signed up our phones (cell and home) for the phone alert message from James City County and at 6:13 the phone rings with a recorded message from the office of the superintendent informing that school is closed due to ice. Then at 6:30 Ara calls to tell me he got his phone alert message about school. At 6:38 Jake comes in to ask what's going on, his alarm is off and the street looks clear. I tell him there is no school. He then tells me his plans for the day which include the Pokemon lyrics and CoD (Call of Duty 4). I have no idea what he is talking about. Later Ara calls to ask me if I got to sleep in. Thankfully we don't have video phone because I silently cussed him out in sign language.

My prediction was right. Cole scored high average and superior with his testing. The only area that brought him down was the vocabulary in the verbal comprehension which he scored average. That surprises me because he is our articulate child who uses $5 word in everyday life. He says things like 'I need a larger assortment of t-shirts'. Not that assortment is a $5 word, but most kids would just say 'I need more t-shirts'. The psych did say that during the testing he was wondering if Cole really had ADD/ADHD because he didn't give up and seem distracted. But after the testing when all three of us were talking the real Cole came out. He laid on the couch, played with his shoes, messed with the blinds, played with his eyelids (was in constant movement). The doc got a kick out of it and just grinned. Taking Cole to any doctor has always been a miserable experience. He can't just sit and wait. He has to explore every cabinet, figure out every instrument, jump off the exam table, crinkle the paper, put on gloves...it's exasperating. He's a little better now, but not much. The psych told me how consequences don't work with ADHD because of how the brain in ADHD physically works. I figured this out long ago, but it makes parenting difficult because the other two think he's never punished. School isn't' working for Cole because they want to dole out consequences for misbehavior and in reality the 'misbehavior' is a symptom of over stimulation or under stimulation. The front end stimulus is greater than the back end stimulus--no impulse control. The neurons that carry messages for impulse control are moving too slow and he doesn't get the message.