Learning Enabled part 3.

Learning enabled part 3.

            Up until now, I have been quiet on the subject of my daughter Sarah. Honestly her coming along helped me to understand that my parenting was NOT to blame for Joey’s difficulties. She responded to my husband and I in ways that let us know we were managing to do something right. Then she outstripped us.

            When she was 18 months she could speak very well in complete sentences. I was stunned. At 2, people understood her plainly when she spoke and mistook her for being 3. At 4 she worked 24-48 piece puzzles with ease and asked if they came bigger. Just before her 5^th birthday she learned reading in one afternoon spent with me. She looked at me and said, “I got it mom. Let me read the rest to you.”  This child continues to amaze me. At 6 she figured out number lines and negative numbers in her head with only vague conversations with her father about numbers “under” 0. As we sat and worked a puzzle, I thought to teach her about borrowing numbers from neighbors to work a subtraction problem. We were playing with Ellanor working a 24 piece puzzle. She had fit 19 of the pieces together. So, I said, sweeping the remaining pieces away, “How many pieces do we have left? 24-19?” Without missing a beat she responds, “Five.” Startled I ask, “How did you get that?” She launched into an explanation of negative one, adding it in, removing it later, and “Mom it’s five. Isn’t it?” Stunned I said, “Yes, but people less bright than you will work the problem this way…..” Last night, at 7 and a half, she asked if she could stop doing the third grade math on her school’s math game website and do the fourth grade level. YES yes you can.

            But there have been difficulties, too.  If there is a problem that her mind cannot easily figure, she is stopped DEAD in her tracks almost to the point of tears. I have had to cajole, pry, and push effort out of her. I realized that things come so easily that when presented with “needing to work,” she has no idea how to process that. We’ve had to have so many conversations on this point. She finally concedes that she needs to face challenges with the immense ability her mind possesses. Then she can catapult past her mother into the atmosphere. She agreed that this was a good goal. Her determination has been inspiring and just a touch frighteningly impressive.

            So I watch her rise to her own person with awe and gratitude for the gift that God has trusted me with. With humble heart I ask for wisdom and capability for training this person to truly become precisely what she means to be.