Apparently We Are Collecting Diagnoses

Well. I was getting on here today to catch you up on Little Bit a uh...little bit. (Sorry). She's 11 1/2 and Facebook just showed me that 6 years ago it was her first day of Kindergarten and she looked like this:

This last year was 5th grade for her and we had quite a year with her too. In the past she has had problems with convergence insufficiency. If you don't know what that is, it's OK. I didn't either at first. It means when her eyes looked at something and each eye took a "picture" of that object, the two pictures didn't converge completely, causing her to see double. As you can guess, this doesn't help with reading. It causes headaches and lots of other problems. As her books got smaller and smaller font, it became more of a problem. We actually only found out what the deal was because my dad mentioned he saw double and Little Bit piped up with, "Me too!" 

News to us! Anyway, we did home therapy using a computer program in the spring of 4th grade and she graduated from that and all was well. 

We had a vision therapy party when she finished.
I had a lot of fun planning it!

Until it wasn't. She started having troubles with her eyes and daily headaches again this year. We went back to the same doctor's office, but a different doctor. He is an older gentleman and has seen his fair share of bad vision. He was truly amazed by how poor her convergence was. He had us come back many times and was genuinely concerned. He kept working with us until we got it back on track though. In the end she had to restart and completely re-do the computer program, in addition to adding reading glasses with prisms. But now she doesn't have daily headaches and can work without pain. 

Of course Tourette Syndrome lives on at our house. Sometimes it was hard to tell if her vision was causing frustration, or her tics. Either way it means I spend a lot of time working with her one on one and that is not good for Sweetheart, who gets off task when the wind blows. 

Towards the end of the year she was having real fits during work, especially math. Crying, screaming, carrying on. SO frustrated. I was hoping she just needed a break for the summer. But then a couple of days ago she had a similar fit while working on some Bible memory stuff for church. Oh dear. I'm not ready for next year if this is how it's going to be. So I posted some questions in some groups I'm in on Facebook and it all snowballed into me messaging our former preacher's wife, who is a dyslexia tutor. She sent me some videos and information and now I am sure, where before I was only suspicious, that we are dealing with dyslexia as well. Very sure. Which of course changes most of the curriculum choices I had already made for next year. And has sent me off on a flurry of research. 

Aww...matchy sisters...

We really didn't NEED another diagnosis. But it's OK. We've been dealing with it all along even when I wasn't sure. 

She is such an awesome kid. She and I did the grocery shopping on Sunday and I realized part-way through that I thoroughly enjoy spending time with her! She's funny and has good ideas and is very responsible. But school....oh school. I'm not ready for ya!