The End of a Long Relationship
So this evening, I ended a longstanding relationship with what had been one of my favorite online groups - Babycenter.com.
When we were pregnant (ok, Noelle was pregant. I was watching) with Isaac, Babycenter was a welcome source of information. We have never shopped on the site, but often relied on the weekly updates on where the pregnancy - and later the baby - was at that point, and what we could expect next.
I think you see where this is going.
With Isaac, he was often at the leading edge of what they said a baby should be doing at any given point, so I never questioned the accuracy or the authority of their info. It reassured me that my kid was brilliant, so I left it at that.
Well. Today I was having a conversation with a Trainer in Scarborough, and she was saying her grandson is not hitting his milestones.
"I know what you mean," I replied.
"Really?"
"Yeah, that's part of the whole Down Syndrome gig," I explained. "Every kid with DS has eithe a mild intellectual delay, or an outright developmental delay."
"But they catch up, don't they?" she asked.
"It's not delay in that sense, they get to a point, and then they stop. Sam will probably finish High School in the normal stream, and may even do a one or two year college program, but I don't know of any DS kids who finish an actual accredited university degree. Hell, we have one relative with DS who wasn't toiled trained until they were 9 years old."
At that point Jan's face totally sank. She must have thought that whatever "delay" referred to in Developmental Delay, was just that - they got to it slower, but in the end, they caught up.
Well, that's true to an extent - in terms of gross motor skills, fine motor skills, self help, etc. But not for everything.
"Don't worry about it," I told her. "Sam is brilliant in other ways. He's 3-4 months back on most of his milestones, but his emotional intelligence is very high, and he's a total charmer. He'll get by fine on that."
So I mentioned this conversation to Noelle, and she was, to say the least...a little miffed. Unfortunately, I had been basing my "3-4 month back" assessment on BabyCenter.com's weekly emails.
So Noelle cracked out the Holy Scripture of Child Rearing in our house: "What to expect in the first year."
It turns out that Sam is NOT three to four months back. He is a little slow on sitting up unasisted, but can actually sit up for several minutes at a time - he just has a thing for trying to stand up - which at this point means straightening his entire body into the stiffness of a piece of particle board. So the end result is that he sits for four or five minutes, then goes crashing straight backwards. Pillows are our friends.
But here is the kicker. Read down a ways and you will see my post about Sam's language. He has two words for sure, and one word (Baby) he has used a couple times. This not only puts him at normal in terms of language skills - it puts him ahead of the curve.
What this all means is, that we are going to end up with yet another clumsy Allen chatterbox.
Now I know all I'm going to get from comparing my baby to percentile charts is a headache, or an ulcer, because it's true, every baby develops differently. It's just that with DS, everyone tells you your baby is going to be 'slow' (not that they use that euphemism any more), and if you hear something enough, you start to beleive it.
One final point. The "Average" IQ, is the range from 90 to 110. When you get a chance, go to www.mikeferry.com, and take a look at the money churning operation that is Mike Ferry Training- the biggest Real Estate Training company in the world. He has six houses: in Hawaii, Palm Desert California, Los Angeles, etc. At the height of his influence, he was American Airline's #1 passenger. That's right. Nobody flew more than him on that airline in that year. He was described on a National Association of Realtors survey that year as being the third most influential person in Real Estate - after George W. Bush, and Allan Greenspan.
He proudly admits in his seminars that he has an 85 IQ. What got him where he needed to be was hard work and persistence, and an unwillingness to take no for an answer.
And it doesn't take a genius to figure that out.
So this evening, I ended a longstanding relationship with what had been one of my favorite online groups - Babycenter.com.
When we were pregnant (ok, Noelle was pregant. I was watching) with Isaac, Babycenter was a welcome source of information. We have never shopped on the site, but often relied on the weekly updates on where the pregnancy - and later the baby - was at that point, and what we could expect next.
I think you see where this is going.
With Isaac, he was often at the leading edge of what they said a baby should be doing at any given point, so I never questioned the accuracy or the authority of their info. It reassured me that my kid was brilliant, so I left it at that.
Well. Today I was having a conversation with a Trainer in Scarborough, and she was saying her grandson is not hitting his milestones.
"I know what you mean," I replied.
"Really?"
"Yeah, that's part of the whole Down Syndrome gig," I explained. "Every kid with DS has eithe a mild intellectual delay, or an outright developmental delay."
"But they catch up, don't they?" she asked.
"It's not delay in that sense, they get to a point, and then they stop. Sam will probably finish High School in the normal stream, and may even do a one or two year college program, but I don't know of any DS kids who finish an actual accredited university degree. Hell, we have one relative with DS who wasn't toiled trained until they were 9 years old."
At that point Jan's face totally sank. She must have thought that whatever "delay" referred to in Developmental Delay, was just that - they got to it slower, but in the end, they caught up.
Well, that's true to an extent - in terms of gross motor skills, fine motor skills, self help, etc. But not for everything.
"Don't worry about it," I told her. "Sam is brilliant in other ways. He's 3-4 months back on most of his milestones, but his emotional intelligence is very high, and he's a total charmer. He'll get by fine on that."
So I mentioned this conversation to Noelle, and she was, to say the least...a little miffed. Unfortunately, I had been basing my "3-4 month back" assessment on BabyCenter.com's weekly emails.
So Noelle cracked out the Holy Scripture of Child Rearing in our house: "What to expect in the first year."
It turns out that Sam is NOT three to four months back. He is a little slow on sitting up unasisted, but can actually sit up for several minutes at a time - he just has a thing for trying to stand up - which at this point means straightening his entire body into the stiffness of a piece of particle board. So the end result is that he sits for four or five minutes, then goes crashing straight backwards. Pillows are our friends.
But here is the kicker. Read down a ways and you will see my post about Sam's language. He has two words for sure, and one word (Baby) he has used a couple times. This not only puts him at normal in terms of language skills - it puts him ahead of the curve.
What this all means is, that we are going to end up with yet another clumsy Allen chatterbox.
Now I know all I'm going to get from comparing my baby to percentile charts is a headache, or an ulcer, because it's true, every baby develops differently. It's just that with DS, everyone tells you your baby is going to be 'slow' (not that they use that euphemism any more), and if you hear something enough, you start to beleive it.
One final point. The "Average" IQ, is the range from 90 to 110. When you get a chance, go to www.mikeferry.com, and take a look at the money churning operation that is Mike Ferry Training- the biggest Real Estate Training company in the world. He has six houses: in Hawaii, Palm Desert California, Los Angeles, etc. At the height of his influence, he was American Airline's #1 passenger. That's right. Nobody flew more than him on that airline in that year. He was described on a National Association of Realtors survey that year as being the third most influential person in Real Estate - after George W. Bush, and Allan Greenspan.
He proudly admits in his seminars that he has an 85 IQ. What got him where he needed to be was hard work and persistence, and an unwillingness to take no for an answer.
And it doesn't take a genius to figure that out.
posted by Jason Allen at 11:18 PM
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