It’s interesting how I have learned to read her own personal cues.   She is the type of child who can go several days normally, and then turn into an all out monster…malicious and vindictive.  And I know as soon as she gets like that she just needs time alone.  Not like a timeout, but time away from everyone else to just be quiet.  Whether it is playing quietly by herself with her barbies, reading a book on her top bunk, or playing on the computer, she just needs an hour or two away from her siblings and then literally before my eyes she turns back into this sweet loveable, loving little girl again.  I’ve also noticed that there is a pattern to it..it happens about every 3 days or so.  Now if only I can schedule our lives to make sure she gets that down time before she becomes Ms. Hyde life would be good.  **Can you tell we had an episode of Jekyl and Hyde today? LOL**

I created this chart for Savanna:

What a life saver it has been.  I am no longer the bad guy.  She eats her dinner because the chart says so, she makes her bed because the chart says so.  Heck she even cleans up her room without fuss..because her chart says so.   She’s even learning delayed gratification, by having to allot points to different rewards instead of lumping them all one ONE reward.   I planned it out specifically that if she wants a half hour a day of Mario Kart racing, she has to spend 30 points a week on it, and if she wants to watch So You Think You Can Dance with me every week, she has to spend 30 points there as well.  That only leaves her with about 24 points/week to spend else where, so she will have to accumulate throughout the weeks to get the big prizes she really wants! **Sleepover at her best friends house is 70 points!** LOL

We started back homeschooling for real this week, and I can’t believe how much her disposition has changed since we got back into a routine, instead of just living all higelty pigelty  (hmm..is that even a word?).  It astounds me everytime how much she craves and requires routine, and regularity.

Heaven Forbid I tell her we’re going to do something and then through unavoidable circumstance the plans have to change.  It’s a nuclear meltdown when that happens.  Which makes planning things difficult.  I can’t “plan” (out loud with the kids anyways) to have a beach day on Friday, because if the weather turns sour and we can’t go then all life as she knows it ends.

There are many days when Savanna seems like just an ordinary 6 year old and I wonder if maybe I am just pushing too much on her thinking that she is gifted.  But then she has a nuclear melt down over a miniscule paper cut and I am left straddling this huge fence that I can’t get down from.  Part of me wants to get her tested, but part of me is just enjoying life and what she brings.  I don’t know if “KNOWING” for certain would change anything in our day to day lives.

But on days like today I find myself slipping off that fence ever so slightly.  She has been bugging me for the last week to start homeschooling her again.  Seriously?  What 6 year old wants to learn and do homework and projects?  I am NOT prepared to homeschool her just now, being away from home, without all my supplies and generally feeling out of sorts with my location.   So I bought her a grade 1 math book, just because it was all they had at the store and I thought it would be something to keep her busy.  According to her grade 1 teacher, math was not her strongest subject so I figured a little practice might be good.  She has whizzed through the first dozen pages or so with one or two wrong in total.  Today I noticed that it started covering a subject she didn’t do in school (grouping/counting in units of tens and ones.)  She read the directions at the top of the page, and within 20 minutes had taught herself the whole unit and gone through all 5 pages.  I quizzed her, and asked her questions afterwards to see if she understood what she was doing, and she totally gets it.  Again…what kind of 6 year old teaches herself math concepts???  So now I am left scrambling again.

Life is never dull and I don’t know really what to do from here.

Maybe this doesn’t really need to be here, but I am SO frustrated right now.  We put Savanna into public school in January so that I could take a temp job.  Before she went in I had just started addition and subtraction to 18, and we were working on sentence structure.  She could identify nouns, pronouns, and adjectives and we were about to start getting more in depth with that.

Well she doesn’t seem to have done much more then that.  I know they did a bit with money (coin value and such).  But in Language Arts they were working on constructing proper sentences (capitals and punctuation), and not working on what goes into a sentence.  What a waste of 6 months. When I talked to the teacher before we put her into school I asked where the class was, and she said that when Savanna joined them they would be starting addition and subtraction up to 10 and moving on from there.  I figured that would be okay, because it is always good to get extra practice in.  I didn’t know “moving on from there” meant that the end goal for the year was math facts up to 18.

She wants to be homeschooled for Grade 2, and has told me so from the beginning.  I was hoping to buy the grade 2 curriculum and start in the middle of July, and just use the next couple of weeks for review and some down time.  I was going through my grade 1 book, and she is NOWHERE near ready to start the grade 2 book.   They didn’t do units of 10’s (that I know of), they didn’t do double digit math, they didn’t do a whole bunch of stuff that we would have covered if I had continued to homeschool her.

Now maybe, this book is advanced for a grade 1 Curr. but we have to spend the rest of the summer, and maybe longer, working on it before we even think about touching the grade 2 stuff.  So the rational part of me is trying to say that she will still get it all in, and that she will still be advancing at her own pace, and that she is still SO far ahead of the other kids that I don’t have to worry about it.  But the irrational OCD side of me is furious at the wasted 6 months, and at the fact that we will be starting “Grade 2″ later then all her piers, and that bugs the gunk out of me.

On a note regarding her, she is such a “law abider” that I am sure she spent a good deal of the last 6 months doing very little, because she wouldn’t dream of acting out while she sat there waiting for the other kids to finish their work.  Prefering instead to just color or wait until they moved on.  She said herself she liked going to school…gym class, library time, music. “But sitting at my desk for all that time Mom.  That is SO boring.”

Savanna’s intense reaction to pain was always something that irked me, until I read somewhere that many gifted children experience intense reactions to things like pain, cold, heat etc as well as just intense reactions in general.

We have always described her as intense…when she was a baby and was getting her 3mo pictures taken the photograper commented that there was no happy medium with her, she was either grinning like a cheshire cat or screaming like a banshee.  And that is very true.  When she is happy, she is not just happy she is jubilant, when she is sad she is inconsolable, when she is mad she is furious.  I just wish for once things weren’t SO extreme, why must I live in a world of dramatics?

This morning we had a few mishaps that appeared to be the end of the world.  The first was when she was lying on the floor in the kitchen (I don’t know why she was doing that…I’m sure I don’t allow it!!)  Anyways I turned around to take a step and she was directly behind me, my toe caught her forehead and she cried, okay she didn’t cry, she wailed….Like I had mortally wounded her.  And it wasn’t for a little while, she cried for a good 10 minutes.  I kept wanting to say “Suck it up and get over it.”  Instead I appologized once for hurting her and then tried my best to ignore it.  About half an hour later she was out on the swingset with her brother and sister and all of a sudden I again heard that “Mortally Wounded” cry.  One would thing I would learn better then to go tearing off to the backyard to access damage and see how many limbs had been lost, but apparently I haven’t yet.  So running I go, and….She and Bash had fallen of a swing together.  He cried for about 30 seconds and then off he went, she wailed for half an hour.  Seriously how am I supposed to deal with this.  Comforting her forever just seems like I am perpetuating it, but yet the other side feels so cold. It is interesting that with my extreme child I can’t find the balance to do things, and tend to run the extreme along with her.

Is this something they will ever grow out of?  The intensity is draining to me.  I don’t have the energy to spend coddling her when she hurts herself, heaping on mounds of praise and doing the happy dance for half an hour when she has accomplished something, or talking til I am blue in the face trying to diffuse the anger and/or hurt when she doesn’t get what she wants, when she wants it.

I love the name and it’s many connotations.  I love that we have a place to sound off with out fear of judgement, or seek advice without looking overbearing.  I love that someone else knows what I am going through, and that even though Savanna isn’t at the same level as her counterparts, she is still above and beyond ME! LOL  But what I really love is that I am no longer alone, and never will be.

Here’s to many years of ups and downs, and hopefully long lasting, lifetime frindships between us, and someday our children!

Candice