Friday, May 18, 2012

Our Journey With What We Thought Was ADHD (Part 1)

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My daughter is a wonderful little girl who talks way too much. (She always has.) But, she is compassionate, loves animals, and has a caring heart.


In Pre-K, she excelled. There was some concern of her fine motor skills, but half-way through the year, she was testing at an end of the year level. They blamed her seeming immaturity on the fact that she was one of the youngest kids in class.

In K, she seemed to do well. But, halfway through the year, I found out that she wasn't completing her classwork and was hiding it in her "chair pocket" (a pouch on the back of her chair). About the same time, I found out that she was making constant horse noises in class and had been all year. When I asked the teacher why she didn't tell me, she said that my daughter was just so endearing that she didn't want to get her in trouble.

In 1st grade, she went through a lying phase. She was getting into so much trouble making noises at school and not completing her work that she hid the notes the teacher sent home. It got to the point that the teacher kept a chart every hour of the school day that my daughter stayed on task and didn't make noises.

In 2nd grade, my daughter had an outburst of anger that caused all of us (me, her teacher, and even the principal) so much concern that they requested I send her to counseling. It turns out that some boys were picking on my daughter and she had enough and threatened to take an axe to them.

In 3rd grade, my daughter's noise-making again became a problem. It was such a problem that student's parents would call in and ask for their child to be moved away from my daughter because she was too distracting. With the help and prompting from my new husband and my daughter's teacher, I agreed to have her evaluated for ADHD. Her teacher and I filled out questionnaires, which were scored by the guidance counselor and evaluated as ADHD by her pediatrician.

(You can read Part 2, here.)

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