Jeff has come sooooo far! Part 1

I am so incredibly proud of my son, Jeff.

I mentioned in previous posts that Jeff has had some issues over the years.  That is a pretty big understatement.

You would think that because he is a genius that he would flourish in school.  That school would be a breeze.  That he would cruise through without even trying.  Well, if school was just reading, writing and math - I always wondered where they got the three R's - than he would.  When you have the ability to learn things the first time you're exposed to them and it takes the rest of us say... 7 times... it can get pretty boring having to wait.

You see our schools are set up to teach toward the middle of the pack.  This makes sense.  They have limited time and they have limited resources.  This even works when you have a "good, smart kid" like our Sam who pretty much rolls with the punches.  Jeff, has never been on of those "good, smart kids".  For most of his school career I would say he was one of the "pain in my butt, smart kids".  I have seen it put in an official study to the term of "at risk smart kids".  I think our jails and prisons are full of them.

We couldn't figure out why Jeff couldn't follow authority or get along with others in school.  Many told us he was just "bored".  While I do believe that part of this is true he was just unable to "play the game" of school.  We tried medication... won't ever do that again.  We tried positive and negative reinforcement.  Nope.  We tried counseling.  The therapist said she wasn't getting anywhere with him and he was pretty much dictating the sessions.  We tried more counseling.  Tested for Asperger's.  Borderline but negative.  Part of these test batteries were IQ tests which Jeff has maxed out one half or the other.

We worked with the Belin Blank Center of The University of Iowa and had testing done there.  They recommended - among other things - acceleration and telescoping of the school curriculum.  Our school districts scoffed.  I even home-schooled Jeff not once, but two different times, because in middle school they threatened to put him in juvenile court if he had more problems.  He was suspended twice during the first few months of sixth grade.  Once for upsetting a chess game because he was losing.  While I don't condone this behavior... suspension?  Come on.

It got to the point where I was wary of answering the phone because the school was calling me daily and most of the time it was about how bad my kid was with the insinuation of how bad we were at parenting.  We put Jeff in the special education department for behavior reasons but still had a lot of issues.  We were extremely frustrated.  I had resigned to the fact that maybe he wouldn't ever get better and maybe he would not be able to live on his own.  Ever.  Very humbling.

We had to start looking at things we hadn't tried before and fortunately we found it.  Jeff was allergic (intolerant) to everything he was eating and when we changed his diet things started to change.

Stick around and read tomorrow's post for more...