beetiger

lediva came out for the weekend for my birthday, bringing with her an Xbox, cables, and the expertise to hook everything together neatly with just one extra visit to Best Buy and a little bit of hacking up of the back of the cabinets. That, together with the copy of Rock Band 2 that

bard_bloom arranged to have here at the same time, is making for my new diversion. I pretty much suck at it, but I'm having fun. (Any of you who do the XBox Live/Rock Band thing, please come find me. Gamertag same ID as here.)

lediva also took me out for VIP seating at the burlesque show Corio, which was a complete blast of a campy Christmas dinner show. The space had a good vibe, the food was better than I expected,

lediva let me drink more than my fair share of the champagne, and we were basically sitting on stage.

projectmothra bought me a Webkinz to match the one he got for his birthday so we could play online together. Apparently he made

bard_bloom go to several stores to find a tiger one.

Birthday proper mostly consisted of getting a mammogram done, with the slightly uncomfortable outcome of "we think everything's fine, but we can't see things that well, so you should go get a breast ultrasound". So yeah. I also heard from an inordinately large number of old high school friends on Facebook. Perhaps I should be paying more attention to them.

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So, after enough bugging by friends who are teachers or who do gifted advocacy of various sorts, I've decided to bring Rhys in for some private assessments, IQ tests and achievement tests and looking at the weird way he processes information about people and seeing if it means anything I should maybe do something different about. I found a psychologist who does a lot of testing with kids and who can put a large part, if not all, of what she does under my insurance. I've explained to him that over Christmas break he's going to spend some time with "Dr. Elaine, who likes to find out about how kids' brains work and who will give you challenges and puzzles", and he's extremely excited about it.

I'm really fussy. Not about whether he's going to have a good experience with it, because he will. He's very used to PTs and OTs and speech therapists and vision therapists and all of that stuff, and he almost always enjoys working with those folks.

But I'm fussy about whether I'm pushing hard when we don't actually have problems right now. I'm fussy about dealing with the school. I'm fussy about the fact that I kind of feel like I want some numbers in order to do the advocacy that I probably should do, about why I want that. I'm worried about medicalizing a pretty normal, pretty happy kid. I'm fussy that I'm going to have numbers that tell me I'm just one of those parents who thinks their kid is more unusual than he is, that I should just take him to an enrichment program after school once in a while and leave it at that, and listen to the relatives tell me that something extreme is going on when it really isn't. (They did that to me.) I'm worried that he actually is going to test out in the profoundly gifted range and I'm going to spend the next decade trying to figure out what to do about that without allowing either or both of us to become insufferable.

This morning, Rhys asked me if the year was almost over. I said it was. He said "Oh good, I am so excited to go to first grade." Sigh. I had to explain it was the calendar year that was over, not the school year, and he would still be in kindergarten in January, and he admitted to me for the first time that kindergarten is kind of boring and he wished it had more work that wasn't relearning stuff.

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I think I'm about the fifteenth or so person on my friends' list to be in roughly this situation, and probably not the most skilled or connected one either, but I'm actively looking for freelance writing/editing/copyediting types of work coming into the New Year. If anyone can help out at all with that, either in terms of actual pointers or jobs, or just in terms of helping me out with my freelance resume or tips on looking for this type of thing, I'd really appreciate it a ton.
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Thanks for listening, everybody.