falling short of the mark?
i have had a couple of reminders in the past few days that jasper, sela and carys are not your average almost three year olds.
friends of ours just returned from Christmas vacation. we spent some time with them and they had their 2.5 year old son over at our place. the kids were all standing around being kids and suddenly our friend noted, "was our son taller than your kids when we left on holidays?" we said we werent sure.
"’cause look at him now!" said the father. sure enough, their sweet son, who is 8 months younger than our kids, is a good two inches taller than my youngest three.
jasper, sela and carys will be three next month. and i cannot think of them in terms of adjusted age anymore. this is them. we’re getting a clearer picture of what the limitations will be. and since several of you have been asking, here is an update.
carys is starting speech therapy soon. she is going to need grommets as well, we think, and a good deal of her speaking problems seem to come (in my professional opinion) from her adenoids or around that area. she still is stiff on one side of her body and she still swings and drags her right side a bit when she runs. she is in about the third percentile for growth and weight. she is being reevaluated for cognitive therapy. her stacking skills are getting better but she still cannot identify a lot of the things the doctor said she should be able to or hold a pen or draw as well as she ought to.
sela is doing well, her language development is good and she is very interested and aware in the world, although her overinflated opinions as to her importance still exist. i don’t have a lot of concerns for sela.
jasper, hard to say because what is inability and what is laziness? and sometimes when i should be urging jasper along and helping him to learn them by making him do things himself (ie:putting on his socks_) he takes so long that i just do it for him. i don’t think he needs speech therapy, his lisp will go away in time and we don’t encourage it. (which is tough because it is very cute). he is also being reevaluated for cognitive therapy, and i will not be surprised if they say he needs extra lessons as well.
the growth thing bothers me a bit, a lot….it bothers me indeed. not that basketball scholarships were part of the plan, and not that i pay a lot of attention to those magazines that state that taller people make more money and get better jobs, etc, the height thing is a reminder to me. they’re still behind. they’re not normal. they’re still preemies.
the dr is saying that they should all take a growth hormone that will give them a couple of inches, but still they’re not predicting the girls will be taller than 5’5. and jasper, 5”7. my own little tom cruise. how glib. the hormone will delay puberty, which will cause it’s own problems, remember the teen years when the slow developing girls weren’t wearing bras and getting teased about it? and then the boy whose voice was the last to crack was getting laughed at or told to sing with the girls in the soprano section (by the teacher!)
and it could be so much worse. you’ve seen the pictures of them racing about and hear the frustration in my writings…you can tell they are perfectly normal two year olds in many senses of the word.
so why is height one of my shortcomings?
