Living in Alphabet Soup.

The days aren't easy.  What is it, the days are long but the years are short?  Yeah, that seems to about sum things up here.  This week has been a flurry.  We've been back to school for a bit now, but we've also been doing some "spring" cleaning, which I'm suspecting is really just wishful thinking - hoping that by calling it "spring" cleaning, the weather will cooperate.  NOPE.  Four inches of snow.  Sigh.  Anyhow, we've been in the midst of this heavy-duty cleanup and purge, and we had our very first visit with our new OT to 'thank' for the crazy.  We would have tried to stretch this out over a month or so, so we're not pitching everything at once, but with a specialist coming?  Yeah, that got moved into a single week.  We've been cleaning like mad over here.

I realized yesterday, talking with TheYoungerMrsWarde from Sceleratus Classical Academy, that I live in alphabet soup. She asked why I hadn't posted in so long, and the bulk of my answer was taken up in SPD, OT, GT, HS, and OMGWTF.  Even more "impressive" was that not a single acronym was out of place, misunderstood, or would have been better served by another term.

Anyhow, here we are.  Today, we had our first visit with Ms M, our occupational therapist.  I say "our" because she really is helping all of us.  That makes a huge difference to me.  She came for a visit, and saw what Mad Natter looks like on a regular, plain ol' winter's day.  It was, to be mild, exciting. Natter showed off how well he runs around the house, how nicely he says "excuse me" before he interrupts, and how much he likes being tossed around in the air. We came out of it with a multitude of suggestions, most of which we're already implementing, but a few that we're not - we will be learning these when we go to our next appointment on Wednesday - and I'm excited to see how they go.

Truthfully, it's difficult to find people who understand the trifecta we have going on here (so far).  Our pediatrician is excellent about his chronological age and our homeschooling, but not gifted issues or SPD.  The OT is wonderful about his SPD, but doesn't understand homeschooling or gifted overexcitabilities. We're still looking for someone local to us to understand anything to do with giftedness.  So, in the end, we take what works for us, and leave the rest.  This usually leads to some irritated practitioners in our wake, but honestly, it's to a point where I've learned that nobody has this child's best interest more to the forefront than I do as his mother.  Other people may have the interests of children as a whole, or children like the ones they're used to working with, but this specific child?  He is my area of expertise, and I need to remember that the things I know to be right for us are the things that are right for us, and while others will have their opinions, it is my job to sift through the things that won't work to find the ones that do.