Today was the day that Walter had testing done with the psychologist. I've been wanting this type of testing for years--a clarification of developmental questions, cognitive testing with interpretation, more information about auditory and visual processing and memory, and collation of aptitude testing with achievement testing.

I don't have information yet. It's driving me crazy. My type-A, need-to-know-now self is going absolutely crazy. I couldn't read the psychologist at all when I went to pick Walter up. It sounded like he did really well with math, but I wasn't sure if that implied (and I'm not making any assumptions that it did...) that he did less well on other things or that this was some outlier. I'm trying to hang tight and wait until I see the results in a week.

I wish that Ollie was also getting the full workup, but right now we seem to be using Walter as the guinea pig and then turning to Ollie later if it makes sense. As his teacher, principal, and mother, it's making sense to me right now. I want to know as much as I can about whether the funky test results from a few weeks ago were anomalies or whether they speak some kind of truth, however inconvenient. I was just explaining to Kerry that I'm not finding myself to be a medicator or an accomodator; I'm an ameliorator. I believe that if there are cognitive deficits, processing deficits, memory deficits, that these aren't fixed values that one must work around, but that they can be improvement with training and rewiring and sustained attention to improving the weakness. And if there's any pronounced weakness, I want to address it, not reduce expectations or simply try to take away the side effects of it. But right now, as I said, I know nothing.

Our co-op today was awesome. The boys got so much out of it. They talked about Afghanistan, the history of recent wars and conflicts in that area, and did exercises from the Time for Kids curriculum. Although Ollie had originally said this isn't what he wanted to do, I heard no complaints from him after their class today, and this is exactly the kind of engaging, current material that I think they need to be talking about and starting to delve into now. They were also able to work on some map skills--creating a paper for determining distance with scale. And they produced some writing, however labored, about a TFK article on preschool obesity, and I'm always a fan of writing opportunities within context.

Frances and the younger girls started an Ancient Egypt unit. They were all into the hands-on part of our day--making a model of the Nile River to demonstrate the fertile effects of the yearly flood. But after we created deltas out of aluminum foil and planted grass seed in our dirt, they were somewhat ready to focus on coloring pictures of shadufs and grass boats while listening to the Magic Treehouse book on Egypt. Frances is so into this now. We started our chicken mummy tonight, something I haven't done for several years now. The older boys were way into Egypt when they were around her age, maybe a little younger, and we did Egypt activities until we ran them into the ground. So it is exciting to be coming back to this with Frances, who was so young the first time around and who also deserves to make a sugar cube pyramid.

Then Ollie had a tennis lesson tonight and Walter wandered around until he found himself with two new friends who just happened to be the children of Frances's piano teacher. On his self-concept rating battery this morning, he rated himself a 4 out of 5 on making a lot of friends. Now he's calling himself a 5, which I don't doubt. This kid picks up new friends everywhere and falls in with a group or starts leading one pied-piper style wherever he goes. So he jumped on a trampoline until he was bright red in the face while Ollie improved his serve. Next time around, though, Walter is going to tennis lessons, too--I can't stand not to develop built-in partners and opponents, and Walter needs to be doing more physical activity. Ollie's passion for tennis at the moment is contagious, though. He is ready to move toward being on the Woodlake bantam team this coming fall, and I'm just happy that he's doing something right down the street because if the truth be told, baseball season is running me ragged. Even if he played tennis 3 days a week, it would make a world of difference if he did it a 5 minute bike-ride or walk from home.

And I'm playing hideous tennis. I am looking forward to improving things tomorrow when Michele and I play again together--I'm feeling slightly bad about doing so poorly at singles (though the person who took my place had no better luck on Monday, either...), but I have a private lesson planned for Thursday morning and I'm playing in a mixed doubles tournament started Thursday evening, so there's hope for me. It's a heavy tennis weekend between the mixed doubles, my weekend league where I'm finally in the line-up, and then entertaining Ollie, who can't get enough.