Connie's ACFW Conference Experience

Because I am still recovering from my ACFW Conference experience, I am just too overwhelmed to post to this website :o(. Woe is me. Instead, I decided to just provide a link of my Conference experience on my group blog. If you are so inclined, take a peak.

http://infinitecharacters.com/2011/09/28/connies-acfw-experience/

Happy reading!!!

Let Him Who Boasts, Boast in the Lord

Has it ever occurred to you when God wrote His big story (or His-story) book, the Bible, He wasn't much for stereotypes? In fact, it seems He often purposely went against the grain. The younger, garden-tending son gets the blessing and has a nation named after him, while the older, more virile son walks off into oblivion. The man "slow of speech and tongue" is the spokesman for the Jews to Pharoah. The man a head above the others was the lesser king, but the one smaller in stature was great. And he fought a giant while still a boy.
Let's not forget, either, that the King of Kings, Lord of Lords began His life in a stable, His first bed a feeding trough.

Why would God, as He created these His-stories, use such paradox? To remind us of the Truths stated in 1 Corinthians 1:27-31. He chose the foolish to shame the wise, the weak to shame the strong, so we would not boast in ourselves, but in the God who made us.

So remember this the next time you are tempted to look down on someone with the lesser profession or a lower level of education and experience. Hold your tongue about the person struggling with a learning disability or one born in a slum. God has a way of turning tables on us all. Make sure you align yourself with those He will use.

The Gifts We Have--Part 3

Today, is the final installment of Staci Stalling's journey with her son's dyslexia. It is in this account where she shares the therapy which made all the difference for him. It is also a reminder to all of us why God tells us Judgement is His. Only He knows all the facts. Staci saw, through her son, a glimpse of her son's challenge that hadn't been revealed to her earlier. 

The Gifts We Have...

Part 3

In January of my son's second grade year, God spoke to me in three unmistakable messages--one from my mom, one from a "random" flyer sent home from school, and one from a note on my table.  All pointed me to a local doctor who specializes in Vision Therapy.  I had never heard of it, and at first I was skeptical.  We were already covered up with homework, and with two other kids, I didn't have time to take on something else.  But I know God, and when He wants me to do something, He will send three messages.  So I went to that first meeting and then signed up for their free screening.

The first free screening turned up some anomalies in my son's vision, so they sent us to the eye doctor to see if he needed glasses.  He did not.  Back at VT for the extended, three-hour testing, we found (and I finally got to see) more anomalies.  Like the fact that my son couldn't follow a ball with his eyes while answering simple questions like how to spell his name.  His eyes would literally start shaking so violently, I could see it from across the room.

After each test, he would sit back and rub his eyes as they turned red and watered.  I had seen him do that thousands of times.  I always thought it was just him. Never would I have guessed it was because his eyes were struggling so hard to work.  Other tests turned up other issues--like his near-to-far focus time.  He could focus near, and he could focus far (think, look down at your paper and then up at the board, and then back down at your paper to copy something from the board).  Each refocus would take progressively longer.  So the first shift in focus might take 5 seconds, the second 10, the third 15, the fourth 20...

Suddenly, those words written across the tops of so many papers, "This was written on the board"  And "He copied this from the board" (with a word circled that was spelled wrong) came into sharp focus for me!  How long was it taking him to try to copy something one letter at a time from the board?  You try it.  Pick a word.  Look up and count to five.  Now look down and count to 10 and write the first letter.  Now look up and count to 15, now look down, count to 20 and write the second letter.  How much was he missing as he diligently tried to get this done?

NO WONDER!

We had a lot of "no wonder" moments.  No wonder he kept "being distracted."  When he was reading, it would go like this: "The boy took the... Mom, guess what Mrs. Jager said today."  "We'll talk about that later.  Read."  He puts his gaze back on the book "The boy went to the barn to...  Guess what Emmy did on the playground."  Talk about FRUSTRATING!  But now, I understood.  His eyes were literally working SO hard, they had to have a break.  It was like his whole system was screaming, "OVERLOAD! OVERLOAD! Overheating, must take a break!"

In fact, that's exactly what the "spells" in first grade had been.  His system got so overloaded that it had to shut down for a few seconds or even a minute to avoid complete meltdown.  The spells weren't causing the reading trouble, the reading trouble was causing the spells.  And it all went right back to his eyes which were not working the way they were supposed to be.

Picture this.  You are going to get into shape.  So you go to the gym and go over to the fifty pound weights.  Now you haven't worked out in forever, but these are the weights you "should" be able to lift.  So you do--or at least you try.  How likely are you to succeed at that?  How likely are you to hurt yourself?  How likely are you to want to do it again and again and again?  Would you if you thought everyone was looking at you and judging you if you couldn't lift them?  Or might you find other excuses to get out of doing it so everyone wouldn't know you couldn't?  What tactics would you employ to give yourself a "break" while you were trying to lift what you couldn't?

That's exactly what was happening with my son (and I'm guessing countless others).  He was trying to "lift that 50 pounds" because everyone expected him to. But the truth was, his eyes simply were not strong enough to do so.

This eye-strength connection also explains why these problems tend to be genetic.  My two siblings, I know only now, struggled with this same problem (and barely made it through school without full-blown dyslexia themselves).  At least four of my husband's siblings also struggled with this.  So much so that I remember the stories of his mom spending hours each night reading each of them their homework.  At the time, being a reader myself, I thought that was horrible. They should have read it on their own.  Now I understand. They simply couldn't, and she had no recourse or resources to do much of anything about it.

So, bottom line is, my son's eye muscles were extremely weak.  His eyes did not converge like they are supposed to.  They would shake when he was trying to read something--especially something with very small print.  They would "jump" back and forth across a line of type so that he didn't read the last word, or he would skip words, or leave words out, or repeat words.  Near-to-far focus was also a problem as was making accurate visual maps of things.  He could not look at a picture and then turn the page and draw what he had seen.  Once it was gone, it was gone.  

In spelling, this meant he had no visual image of the words.  He couldn't "see" them in his mind.  That's why, when we tried to spell in the van in the mornings, he would refuse to spell the words.  He couldn't see them, and he couldn't write them down, so he couldn't spell them.  (Dumb me thought he was being obstinate!  Hello, 50-pound weight!)  It was the same with the words he read.  Suddenly, the fact that he was trying to memorize the same words three times--once to read them, once to write them, and once to spell them, as if they were three separate words, made sense.  So did the fact that to that point, he could read words he couldn't spell, but he could also spell words he couldn't read.  That never made sense to me.  Now it was starting to.

I have to say as much as his eye therapy helped him, it helped me equally.  I finally understood he wasn't being lazy.  He wasn't trying to be distracted.  He wasn't trying to test my patience. There were real, physical challenges he was experiencing, and we needed to work on them and fix them as much as possible for him to be able to do this.  So, we started with the 1-pound weights with the new eye exercises and started working our way up to what he "should be able to do."

And the results were nearly instantaneous.  He went from mid-80's in spelling to mid-to-high 90's and even a couple of tests over 100 due to bonus words.  Tests that would have been disasters, in the 65-magnitude before, were now low 90's.  In the van, he could spell the words accurately and fast. He went from struggling through 18 easy pages of reading a night to 55-average easy pages of reading a night (in 20 minutes).  He was finally starting to READ instead of stumble around.

We continued our intensive at-home reading and added in the home therapy, which are basically little exercises for the eyes that take about 10 minutes a day to accomplish.  Eye therapy has just become a way of life around here.  In fact, my older daughter (16), who had incredible reading challenges of her own in fourth grade, has now begun eye therapy as well.

She has one eye that doesn't turn in like it's supposed to.  For a long time she read by moving her head, and she had horrible headaches all the time.  Glasses helped once the eye doctor agreed to give her starter glasses (and before we knew about eye therapy).  But the eye therapy is turning up issues we didn't even know were problems--other than she had great difficulty doing simple things like catching a ball or transferring things from one hand to the other.  Now we know... it was her eyes that were the problem all the time!

Toward the end of school with my son, we went back and started the Hooked on Phonics program again.  He went through all six levels (two he had never been able to do) in about six weeks.  His final six week Language Arts grade was a 95.  Even more importantly, I see the confidence in reading he's gaining.  We can now sit down and read for nearly an hour with only a few distractions.  He can focus on what he's reading so that he gets the jokes and thinks the stories are funny.  He's finally enjoying them.

He's learning to "chop" long words, and we're tackling those last few letter combinations he's having trouble with. Finally it's not ALL of them!

Best of all, his wonderful little personality is back.  He's happy. He makes up stories and plays for us again.  He's creative and excited about life.  His new big thing for the summer is the bunny trap he's set up in the backyard to try to catch an unsuspecting rabbit.  I thank vision therapy and God for lighting our way through this unbelievable darkness.  As a parent, I can't tell you how lonely I felt so many nights as I tried to figure out what was going on, praying that somehow we would find something that would help.

So to parents out there who are struggling with their dyslexic son or daughter, please know, there is hope.  And to all of you who have this challenge in your life, know that there are answers.  It's not "just you."  You are not "stupid."  In fact, you have many, many gifts wired into you as well as this challenge.  Please know that you have my respect for getting this far and not giving up.  Know also that God has a plan for you, and He's right there with you.  He will lead you to your answers if you will take His hand and trust Him to show you.

The gifts we have, we are given to share.  I believe that.  As a parent of a son who is on the cusp of being a "former-dyslexic," I want to pass on the gift of knowledge that we have gained about Vision Therapy.  It is truly one of the best gifts I have ever received!

To see Parts One and Two of this moving story:

The Gifts We Have

The Gifts We Have--Part 2

 

A stay-at-home mom with a husband, three kids and a writing addiction on the side, Staci Stallings has numerous titles for readers to choose from.  Not content to stay in one genre and write it to death, Staci’s stories run the gamut from young adult to adult, from motivational and inspirational to full-out Christian and back again.  Every title is a new adventure!  That’s what keeps Staci writing and you reading.  Although she lives in Amarillo, Texas and her main career right now is her family, Staci touches the lives of people across the globe every week with her various Internet endeavors including:

Spirit Light Moments -- One moment with God each day

  http://spiritlightmoments.com

Facebook Author Page at:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Spirit-Light-Author-Staci-Stallings/266593276699576

Search Staci's Books:

http://stacistallings.wordpress.com/

Spirit Light Books--The Blog
  http://spiritlightbooks.wordpress.com/

Or...

Follow Staci on Twitter @StaciStallings

Come on over for a visit…

You’ll feel better for the experience!

The Gifts We Have--Part 2

Today, we welcome Staci Stallings again to share more of her story about how she dealt with her son's dyslexia. You might want a tissue as you see the struggle of a little boy who is trying hard, but doesn't have the same tools as the other kids in his class. But with a mother's love ... and determination, they are able to pinpoint problems, and with God's guidance, find solutions.

The Gifts We Have...
Part 2

True to my nature to learn everything I can about a problem I'm facing, I ordered books on dyslexia and devoured them.  We got the first part of the Barton Solution program and started work.  There was an almost immediate change.  For instance, my son had not seen before that words are made of different combinations of letters.  To him, every word was unique and had to be learned or memorized as a unit.  He would, for example, see bag and translate that to:  starts with b, little letter, long letter.  Then file it in the little Rolodex of memorized words in his mind.

That worked until we hit beg.  When it wasn't bag, he would start guessing, based on what the picture looked like or what the sentence clues were.  Until we hit bog... then boy.  His "reading" would sound like this.  "We went to the bag..."  "No, look at that letter.  It's an o."  "Oh, beg."  "No, hon, look it's an o..."  "Oh, boy..."  It was incredibly frustrating! Talk about falling on God's patience because mine was shot.  That's about all I did!

I remember that first night after I figured out it was dyslexia.  I was laying in bed with him praying, before putting him to sleep.  I said, "So, reading's kind of hard, huh?"  He said, "Yeah" in the most defeated voice I'd ever heard. (I had always known if we let this thing get too big of a hold, it would affect what he thought of himself.  That night, I knew it already had.)  I said, "So the other kids at school, they can read?"  He said, "Yeah, they brag a lot."  "Brag a lot?  What do you mean?"  He said, "They say, 'I can read this.  I can read that.'"  My heart was nearly breaking for how sad he sounded.  I said, "And you can't?"  He said, "No."

I laid there for a few moments and then I said, "So when you read, do you guess a lot?"  He looked at me really puzzled and said, "Mom, that's all reading is, is a lot of guessing."  

That was a "take a breath and realize you were doing all you knew to do" moment, but wow.  It was the first time I really "got" how much he was struggling!  And yet, he hadn't given up.  My respect for that little boy, and all who suffer in silence with this, increased exponentially in that moment.  I had read with him for over 50 hours at that point, and I had no idea he was literally trying to guess at nearly every word!

After the first few Barton lessons, he finally grasped the concept that each letter made a sound and you put them altogether to make a word.  What a breakthrough!  One night in bed, we were reading comic strips.  He had to find three words that he knew.  He found the number 3.  I said, "3 is not a word."  He said, "Th  r  ee.  Yes, it is!"  I was so happy, I could have cried!

So we bounced along, working through the Barton System until we got back into school for second grade. The homework amount was unbelievable, and we had to ditch most of our reading work just to get the homework done each night.  Thankfully, he wasn't having trouble with math (except word problems), but spelling was a mountain almost too high to climb that first semester.  After a LOT of work, we got the first six weeks report card home.  He'd gotten an 83 in Language Arts.  He was in tutoring for reading.  We'd taken him out of Spanish because he just couldn't handle that too, and his learning was sporadic at best.  Each Friday of the spelling tests was a gauntlet, it might go good, and it might be a disaster.  You just could never tell because he was still guessing at so much.

Then came the turn-around that would change everything...

 ***

Check out Part 3 next Friday as Staci tells us about the therapy that ushered in the breakthroughs her son so desperately needed.

 

A stay-at-home mom with a husband, three kids and a writing addiction on the side, Staci Stallings has numerous titles for readers to choose from.  Not content to stay in one genre and write it to death, Staci’s stories run the gamut from young adult to adult, from motivational and inspirational to full-out Christian and back again.  Every title is a new adventure!  That’s what keeps Staci writing and you reading.  Although she lives in Amarillo, Texas and her main career right now is her family, Staci touches the lives of people across the globe every week with her various Internet endeavors including:

Spirit Light Moments -- One moment with God each day

  http://spiritlightmoments.com

Facebook Author Page at:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Spirit-Light-Author-Staci-Stallings/266593276699576

Search Staci's Books:

http://stacistallings.wordpress.com/

Spirit Light Books--The Blog
  http://spiritlightbooks.wordpress.com/

Or...

Follow Staci on Twitter @StaciStallings

Come on over for a visit…

You’ll feel better for the experience!

The Gifts We Have

Today, I have the privilege of  welcoming Staci Stallings to LBOC again. Just recently, I saw an interview she gave about her upcoming book, entitled Coming Undone. In the interview she mentioned writing a new story inspired by her experiences dealing with her son's dyslexia. She has graciously accepted the invitation to tell us a little more about this experience from a mother's point of view. I love her story, because it is about a mom who, though needing to address her son's challenges, still sees him in terms of his gifts. He is God's creation and made especially for the specific task God has laid out for him. All of these experiences are the training to do this task.

I will be posting this story in three parts, over the next few Fridays. Part one is the first discovery.

The Gifts We Have...
Part 1

Every child comes prewired with certain gifts and challenges.  For some, personality is a gift; for others it is a challenge.  For some sports, academics, or music is a gift.  For others, one or more of these is a challenge.

And so it was with my youngest son.  Growing up he had a vivacious, people-attracting personality.  He was just fun to be around (and I'm not saying that because I'm his mom).  He was drawing his own fully-thought-out stories by the time he was four.  He would bring them to me to write the words, and look out if I didn't get the dictation right.  For days afterward, he would stop when I got to something I hadn't written the exact way he had said it, and tell me what it should have been.

He was also, to my thinking, a good reader.  We would lie in bed at night, and he would "read" to me.  At least I thought he was reading, but then again, back then I thought a lot of things that didn't turn out to be reality.

The first indication we had that something was amiss was during his first kindergarten review.  The teacher said that he couldn't do his m's.  He would make them w's about half the time, and he couldn't remember what sound they made.  Me, the ever-finder-or-maker-of-a-solution went home and started working with him on the letter m.  To my surprise, it took over a week for him to finally "get" m.  Now I thought that was strange at the time, but as a mom with experience, I chalked it up to one of those quirks all kids have.

By first grade, however, my son's school experience turned decidedly darker and much more frightening.  Spelling was the loudest rumble of the coming storm.  When he would practice spelling, he would copy one letter at a time no matter how many times I tried to show him to copy the "whole thing."  Studying spelling became a nightly ordeal.  Even simple words seemed beyond his comprehension, and I couldn't understand that at all.  Meltdowns were frequent as were times of outright refusal to even try.  My normally happy-go-lucky kid devolved into anger and tears more than once, and I was at a loss for what else to try.

He was great with words verbally.  He was telling me that spiders were "hideous" and the meal was "delicious," yet spelling "girl" proved an almost insurmountable obstacle.  We studied "girl" with four blocks--g i r and l--literally for 20 minutes straight.  It was a mess.  There was no rhyme or reason to what letter he put where.  When he finally was getting more hits than misses, we moved on to bird, but when we went back to girl in 10 minutes, it was like he had never seen the word!

I remember getting into bed that night and saying to my husband, "Something's wrong."  But no one could tell us what that something was.

We struggled.  He struggled. I struggled.  The teacher was sympathetic.  She said that a lot of kids have trouble spelling and reading in the first grade, and his personality and how he dealt with other kids was great, so not to worry.  But I was worried--especially when just before Christmas he started having little black-out spells in class.  (Check worried.  I was near panic.  By that point, God and only God was keeping me together.)  The doctors wanted to do tests on him, but when we got to the hospital, my son refused to do the testing.  So we left, praying for a different answer.

From that time forward about six months, we tried everything.  Spelling would improve and then fall off a cliff again.  I realized around that time just how much trouble he was having reading.  We got Hooked on Phonics starting at Kinder year.  He couldn't do it.  Sometimes he would say "cat" for "cat," but he might also say "can't" or vice versa.  Each new lesson was like a battleground.

I'm apparently rather slow because it took four months of reviewing and reviewing and reviewing the lessons for me to realize that he still wasn't reading anything.  He was literally memorizing every single page!  That's why I had thought he could "read" before--he was memorizing everything!

The day I "figured out" it was dyslexia, we were trying to read forward to a new lesson in Hooked on Phonics.  I had heard of dyslexic children "moving" while they read, but I had never seen it until that moment.  He was up.  He was down.  He'd lean on me.  He'd lay on the floor.  He'd sit on the chair...  It was then that I finally faced the fact.  This had to be dyslexia.  Nothing else made sense.

So I went online praying for some guidance as to what to do next.  That's when I firmly believe God stepped in with our first answer.  It was a program from the website Bright Solutions for Dyslexia by Susan Barton.  The first door opened for us with her video about the symptoms of dyslexia.  It was 3 hours and 19 minutes long.  I thought, "I'll watch for awhile."  Yeah, 3 hours and 19 minutes later, I was still sitting there, taking notes as fast as I could write, knowing that finally we had found some answers!

... Stay tuned, next week as Staci describes finally seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.

A stay-at-home mom with a husband, three kids and a writing addiction on the side, Staci Stallings has numerous titles for readers to choose from.  Not content to stay in one genre and write it to death, Staci’s stories run the gamut from young adult to adult, from motivational and inspirational to full-out Christian and back again.  Every title is a new adventure!  That’s what keeps Staci writing and you reading.  Although she lives in Amarillo, Texas and her main career right now is her family, Staci touches the lives of people across the globe every week with her various Internet endeavors including:

Spirit Light Moments -- One moment with God each day

  http://spiritlightmoments.com

Facebook Author Page at:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Spirit-Light-Author-Staci-Stallings/266593276699576

Search Staci's Books:

http://stacistallings.wordpress.com/

Spirit Light Books--The Blog
  http://spiritlightbooks.wordpress.com/

Or...

Follow Staci on Twitter @StaciStallings

Come on over for a visit…

You’ll feel better for the experience!