…and another challenge.

Today has been a different kind of challenge for us.  We have long been aware that as well as his dietary difficulties, M has also struggled in the classroom.  He’s a bright lad, articulate and with an imagination that many would envy, but he has struggled to learn to read and write.  He loves to be creative, to perform and can sometimes answer mental arithmetic faster than G, but he struggles to spell and put his creativity down on paper as the written word.

Having finally found the diagnosis for his health issues, Mike and I decided we needed to seek an answer to the academic ones.  M completed 12 weeks of fairly intensive speech therapy at Easter which enabled him to say his “s” sounds clearly and we have seen his confidence grow.  Now it’s time to see if we can give him a pair of metaphorical wings and watch him soar.

So, this morning, instead of heading off to school and work with our packed lunches in tow, M and I made our trek to the Dyslexia Centre for an assessment.  M met with a lovely Educational Psychologist for just over 2 hours, where she put him through his paces.  The answer came back with a resounding “yes”; they could identify the problem and there is something we can do to help.  M has dyspraxia and possibly also visual dyslexia.  This is going to be a steep learning curve for us, but in a nutshell, he is going to struggle with processing the messages his brain sends as they are not properly or fully transmitted.

We came away with 2 coloured acetates, one yellow and the other “celery” (I kid you not), which will help him track lines when reading text or numbers – this is the visual dyslexia part.  We now need to research the options for an occupational therapist to help with the dyspraxia, an optician who specialises in the diagnosis of visual dyslexia and the processes we can put in place and can ask school to do to help him.  Whilst this seems, and feels, like yet another set of labels for M, I am relieved to have an answer to his academic struggles and a resource to be able to find some fixes for it.

On the dietary front, both Mike and I have managed okay and, as I type this blog, Mike is putting the final touches to tonight’s dinner.  My biggest struggle today has been hunger pangs, I have found that I don’t feel as full on M’s diet as I usually do, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.  Mike’s is the continued avoidance of the cakes and cookies at work, which is definitely not a bad thing. The hardest thing for tonight’s dinner?  No mayonnaise, which I love to eat with Corn fritters and sausages normally.