Coburn Kids

We had our marathon of doctor appointments for Caden’s cleft clinic a week ago.  8 doctors in 3 hours is so tiring!  He was a trooper though and just perfect with everyone poking him.

So first update is that Caden will be going in for surgeries 9 & 10 this June.  They’ll be fixing his redundant lip tissue and then he has a fistula (hole) in his upper palate that needs to be fixed as well. (And yes, I do get a kick out of telling people that my son has his own plastic surgeon.) He doesn’t need ear tubes though since he passed his hearing test this time. It will be interesting doing all this with a 3 1/2 year old since he’ll understand so much more.  I imagine it will be much scarier for him.

We need to get him into the dentist as he has 2 cavities, so sad. Being a preemie though and with their notorious bad teeth this doesn’t surprise us. Brushing his upper teeth with the way they lay back against the roof of his mouth is difficult to say the least.

Next update is that we finished Adessa’s dyslexia testing.  There are 4 classifications of dyslexia and here’s the way they explained them to us:

Mild – Probably would never be tested.  Would struggle a bit when they were older in school, have some dyslexic moments but otherwise perfectly normal.
Moderate – Where most kids in the tutoring center are. They usually come in about 3rd or 4th grade when their reading isn’t progressing and they just can’t seem to keep up with the other kids. Usually very bright and smart and have been able to cover and hide it until this point.
Severe – Very early signs as soon as they enter school. Reading does not progress and everything is very labored.  Again, very smart kids and there is a huge disconnect in their knowledge versus what they can read and write.
Profound – Does not progress at all. Nearly impossible to learn how to read and/or write without extensive tutoring and help.

Adessa has severe dyslexia and severe dysgraphia (the writing side of dyslexia). She’s going to need a few years of tutoring in order to learn to overcome some of these problems. The good news is that her Chinese shouldn’t be impacted at all being a character based language. We just got done with parent-teacher conference and Adessa is doing fantastic in her immersion program. The writing she struggles with a bit but she is retaining the words better than the English side in reading ironically.

Learned some interesting things about dyslexia though. There’s a common misconception that dyslexic’s simply see the words backwards and it’s actually not that at all. When seeing a word on a page like CAT it takes just a few moments for their brain to catch up with what their reading.  So they see the T first. It explains why all of Adessa’s #’s are backwards as well.  17 is written at 71, etc.  Even when she writes 17 correctly she does the 7 first and then puts the 1 in front of it. So that’s helpful in knowing just what she is dealing with.

So we’re going to get her in tutoring twice a week for an hour each time and this will be for the next year or two. A lot of time commitment but she needs it and I would hate to see that enthusiasm she has for school suddenly disappear as she gets more and more frustrated.