What a difference a day makes ...

In my last post, I was so concerned about Daughter's mental heath and felt like we were making no progress at all. And then Friday happened. On Friday, she seemed to turn the ship around. Several wonderful things happened on Friday. First of all, may I shout from the roof tops that Daughter got a C+ on her math test! We have been living in the land of "Fs" for a couple of months now, so this is nothing short of miraculous. There are a couple of factors that might have contributed: one, her teacher started allowing her to take math tests in the library. Daughter gets so frustrated by distractions in the room during tests, and this especially hurts her during math. She has literally cried about the "loud" sound of other children writing and erasing ... if that doesn't sound like ADHD, I don't know what does. Her teacher first let her try testing at a table at the back of the room and she liked that better. But when she allowed Daughter to test in the library, she really hit the jack pot. The library is Daughter's "happy place." Everything about the library suits her. So that was a great move.

Also, we had a really great homework session on Thursday evening. And her Friday morning tutoring also went well. Both of these I attribute to her attitude. I wish I knew what it was that turned her attitude around. But sadly, I do not. If I knew what button to push, trust me -- I would push it every time. BUT ... is it a coincidence that we started the new, increased dosage of Concerta on Thursday morning and had these improvements? It's a little too soon to know for sure, but I'm going with it for now.

Friday was also Daughter's 4th Grade Spelling Bee. Daughter is a fantastic speller and has qualified for the Spelling Bee every year since second grade. She finished 9th out of 18 kids, which was a disappointment to her (last year she was 3rd). But we were very proud of her. Also, she turned her disappointment around rather quickly and didn't dwell on it all day -- didn't let it derail her math test, for example, so I think that is a real victory.

Since my husband and I were at the school for the Spelling Bee, we scheduled her annual speech IEP for the same day. She does not qualify for an educational IEP, only speech, but this year the IEP meeting was really different because of the new ADHD diagnosis. I found it to be a really positive experience. The OT who recently evaluated her joined us, as well as the speech teacher, her regular classroom teacher, and the process coordinator for the school. There was a great deal of brainstorming among the group on things we could do to improve Daughter's functioning at school. I'll talk about some of these things in future posts.