Smart kid...

When Jack was very little, you would not have heard me brag on him. Don't get me wrong, he was cute, extremly cute. He was the kind of kid you wanted to have curl up on your lap and when he came and loved on you, your heart would just melt. Of course, getting him to stop long enough to do such things was impossible. There is a theory that the charactor "Jack-Jack" in the movie "The Incredibles" is actually based on our Jack...especially the part where he turns into a little devil.

We did early intervention...the therapist could not get him to sit long enough to work with her. His speech was so delayed, that at almost four, he had only a very few words. His dad, John, and I went from, "There is nothing wrong with him." to "What in the world is wrong with him?" to "Are we just lousy at this? After having three girls, do we just not know how to raise a boy?" to "Could Dobson be wrong about everything?"

But all of that changed in the summer before his 4th birthday. Another mommy told me about a diet change that she used for her daughter. The diet, she said changed her daughter's life and her own at the same time. While I was afraid that I was going out to buy snake oil, I purchased the information and with in 24 hours, Jack said his first full sentances. He no longer played, "Catch me if you can" and actually responded to the word, "No" for the first time. A child I could not reach, was suddenly one that I could interact with.

I knew, for sure, we were on the right track a few days later, when John and Jack were sitting on the floor together playing army men, and John looked at me and said, "Thank you for giving me my son back." Melts a mommy heart even now.

Where I use to think it would be Ritolin for Jack and Xanex for me, we instead had "The diet". His sisters saw huge changes too, but that is another story for another time. The diet is called The Feingold Program and you can check it out here for yourself> http://www.feingold.org/

That was almost six years ago and we have never looked back...well, yes we have. But the occasional off diet treat is never worth the symptoms we have to tolerate until the kids are back to our version of normal.

The diet allowed us to actually parent these wonderful kids. It also allowed us to also see where, if at all, any of the kids had learning glitches and all of them had one area or another that was stronger or weaker.
But Jack had the biggest glitch of all. He is dyslexic. That is something that we probably never would have figured out had it not been for the diet.

I had the privilege of teaching Jack to read while we homeschooled. When the Lord very clearly closed the door on homeschooing in this season, all five kids went back to school. He is now in a class with other kids who learn reading like he does...
Well yesterday was his end of the year review. He is way behind in reading and writing in comparison to his classmates. But he is ahead in terms of knowledge. It's all in there and he is a great visual and auditory learner. He just needs to be able to get it on and off of the paper!

Now as a mom, there is a huge sigh of relief. Yay! My kid is smart! But there is another sigh from a mom who is trying to make a living as a writer...sigh. I love to read, almost anything and everything. So does his dad. To have our child struggle with the tool needed to learn everything is awful hard on the heart strings.

And then I remembered a verse by Paul:
" For I consider myself not in the least inferior to the most eminent apostles. But even if I am unskilled in speech, yet I am not so in knowledge; in fact, in every way we have made this evident to you in all things. " (2 Cor 11:5-6)

Paul knew he was in no way inferior in any way. He knew his strengths and while he may have been unskilled in one area...he had knowledge that he was able to share...so much so, that we are still taking part in what God revealed to him today.
It is no less so with Jack. As he attempts to read The Word each night, he gains the knowledge, even as he struggles with the words on the page. You see we are told in The Word to hide it in our hearts...not to pass an ELA exam to do it.

I may wish I could send Jack off with a good book to read. But instead, I get to curl up with a non-Jack-Jack and read The Greatest Story ever told. Not a bad place to be on a Wednesday morning!