Extra-vision

 
You may remember that Dash got glasses late last year. I hoped that that would do the trick, and his reading would take off like a rocket, the way his teacher assured me that with his large vocabulary and interest in learning, it was bound to.

But it didn't. We sort of ignored it, and his reading did improve. He ended first grade reading at a mid-second grade level, which should be perfectly good enough for anyone. And yet. It didn't help that I kept hearing tales of his peers who were suddenly leaps and bounds ahead of their supposed reading level - I mean, a certain number of people have to be average (because we don't live in Lake Wobegone), and I'm not demanding that everyone has to admit that my baby is brilliant... but.

I still had the feeling there was more to it. The tipping point came last week when a comic arrived in the mail - a late birthday present that's a bit more advanced in reading requirement than the sender realised, I think, but Dash was eager to get stuck in. Listening to him laboriously sound out the contents of each speech bubble was painful. Thinking harder about it, the all-caps style of comic writing probably makes it harder to recognise words than the ups and downs of regular mixed case; but surely he should be further ahead than that by now, I thought. Something just hasn't clicked for him the way it should have.

I asked some helpful people online, and some helpful people online gave me just what I needed: the vocabulary to Google the right resources. What I needed to look for was not just a regular optometrist, or ophthalmologist, but a behavioral or pediatric or developmental optometrist/ophthalmologist. These are doctors trained not just to assess how well people's eyes work, but also how well the eyes are working together and sending messages to the brain, and how the brain is interpreting those messages.

In short order, I had found this website and this directory, and was feeling a lot more proactive about the whole thing.

A lot of what that Vision and Reading page said had me nodding and aha-ing. I got Dash to look at the examples of blurred text and he spotted the one that looks the way his blurry words look. (They're only blurry sometimes, but I don't think that's the full extent of his issue.) The clincher was the checklist: I came up with a score of 29. They say anything over 20 warrants further investigation.

The next morning I called our pediatrician's office and our local optometrist to see if they had any recommendations, but in the end I used the COVD directory and found an office not too far away that sounded from their website as if they were just what we needed. They had an appointment for an initial eye test on Tuesday, so along we went.

Tuesday's was mostly a regular eye test with a few different elements and a chat with the doctor about why we were there. But what we said, and my answers on their slightly different checklist, were enough for them to bring us back in today for a two-hour long evaluation that covered how Dash reads, how he sees and interprets and remembers shapes, how he writes and spells, how his eyes track lines of text, and probably many other factors I didn't even know were being assessed.

The paperwork included a question sheet to be filled in by the child's teacher, but with only two days' lead time (we'd filled the spot of a cancellation) I didn't manage to get hold of Dash's teacher before the appointment. However, she called me back later and said that her own children had benefitted from vision therapy, that she'd been surprised when Dash did not test into TAG (the more advanced stream) based on her observations of him, and that she had wondered why his reading hadn't improved even more than it did this year. (You know, I do feel she should have said something about that to me without this prompting.) So we'll add her input to the pile too.

We wait two weeks for all the information to be put together, and then we go in for a conference to see what's up. It's likely not to be something that's a quick fix with new glasses; it might be something that calls for vision therapy. I don't know if there's a middle path between those two. Worst/best-case scenario, I suppose, we just paid out of pocket to be told that our son is a perfectly average slowish reader. I would be okay with that. Honest. I don't want him to be a supergenius hampered by dyslexia. (It's probably not dyslexia. But the problems we're talking about are in that sort of family.)

I will keep you posted.