Notes from Friday

I wanted to tack on a few things from a couple of the big events on Friday, more so I'll have them written down later on than anything else. :)

The boys' physicals:

They have both grown, but are at about the same percentiles on the growth charts as they were a year ago. I'm encouraged that they're growing, and I know they are healthy. They have so much more muscle than they did a year ago. However, the visit was not all fun.

We will be going to a new pediatrician after this visit. I'm not going to go into all of the details, but I was livid by the time we left and none of my children will ever be going back to that pediatrician. He actually suggested giving Dima stimulants to see what would happen. Not because he's been diagnosed with anything that could be treated with stimulants, but just to see if it changed any of his behavior or speech patterns. Sorry, my child is not a guinea pig. There were a number of other things that went on in the visit that were completely against what I want for the boys, and what I believe they deserve. He knew nothing about the boys' medical history--that Dima is in OT right now, that we're trying to get him speech therapy--even though he has signed off on all of the referrals (or someone in his office has signed for him!).

Thankfully, I think we've already found a new pediatrician and I'm really excited about her. I talked to her on the phone for quite a while yesterday (yeah, she actually called me back!) and I think she's going to be great.

Parent-teacher conferences:

Both of the boys' teachers feel they will be ready to move up into the next grade next year. However, Dima's teacher did express some concern that she thinks it might be good to hold him back because she's worried about him being bullied. We think the bullying might stop if she stopped treating him as a teacher's pet, but that's neither here nor there. We're not worried about the bullying, and we're not going to hold him back academically just because of that. We know which kids are involved and we'll keep an eye on it next year. She did mention that he does know how to fight back. ;) So I'm not it's so much that he's getting bullied as he's getting picked on, and he's learning how to respond to that. Last week he read (yes, read!) for the teacher he had last year (Zhenya's teacher this year). He only had Mrs. H for a few months, but she saw him at the very beginning. He'd only been home a few months when he started in her class, so she knows exactly how far behind he was coming in.

Dima read to her from the highest level reading book in his kindergarten class. She almost started crying. :)

Dima's teacher was also amazed, as he is not in the highest level reading group but has been begging her to let him read from that book for the past several weeks. She finally just gave it to him to get him to stop pestering her. :) His reading is still slow, and he lacks comprehension (because he's working so hard on the reading part he doesn't pay attention to what the sentences actually say) but he's getting there very quickly.

Zhenya knows all of his letters now and can write his name independently. His biggest problem right now is memorizing his Bible verses. And it's not that he doesn't memorize them; it's that he doesn't want to say them at school. But everyone in his class gets a reward whether they say them or not. I suggested to his teacher that once or twice of him not getting the reward when he doesn't say it would probably be quite enough incentive for him to say them. As expected, he has a hard time sitting still when he doesn't want to be sitting still. He can play with his blocks sitting at the table at home for an hour, but he's not so inclined to sit and do seatwork at school.

Overall, very good conferences. We're very pleased with and proud of the boys' progress, especially since they've only been speaking English a little over a year!