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On the math front: I recently found a website that will make your blog into a book, which I immediately did for the 2005-2006 posts, and reading Nate Nate: The Early Years has been something of a revelation. On the one hand, I find most of what I wrote extreeeemly tedious. Why did I chronicle so much of what they ate? Why did I describe every moment of Jonah's learning to crawl as if there were a breathless audience dying to know which knee he pulled forward first on any given day? On the other hand, Steve and I were also extreeeeemly amused by random anecdotes we had totally forgotten. Like that when teeny tiny Nate was first starting to read, he only wanted to sound out certain words, and to speed up the process and keep his rhythm going, he decided to substitute "hams" for all the words he didn't feel like reading. Thus: "Hams, hams, hams, hams, tree, hams hams a bird!" he would read. Oh, the laugh we had remembering that little nugget! Or the time we got him to eat pasta by singing, "If you're happy and you know it, eat some pasta!" Ha ha ha, 2 year olds are so dumb!
Anyway, I realized that in 5 years, when I'm slogging through old blog entries that seem super fascinating to me right now, I'm going to want to remember everything. And so I now record Nate's math work of late, which is interesting to me now and is going to be interesting to me forever.
Here's the prime numbers bit I mentioned in the last post: Nate tells me, "Mom, I have a puzzle for you! Write down all the numbers from 1-100." I do. "Circle 1. Now circle 2, and cross out all its multiples." I do. "Ok, now circle the next number that's not crossed out [3, for those counting at home], and cross out all of its multiples." Ok. 6 is already crossed out, so I cross out 9, 12 is already crossed out, etc., etc., done. "Ok, now circle the next number that's not crossed out, and cross out all of its multiples." This continues, until somewhere around circling 23, I realize that I'm circling all the prime numbers. "Nate!" I exclaim. "These are all the prime numbers!" "Yeah, I know!" "Where on earth did you learn that?" I ask. "I just thought of it!" he beams.
Math tidbit #2: "Dad," Nate muses over breakfast. "You know how you can tell when the next number that's a square is coming? You start with 1 and add 3 to get to 4. Then you keeping adding 2 more to what you added. So you add 5, because the next square is 9. Then you add 7, because the next square is 16. Then you add 9, because the next square is 25...
It works. Try it.
That, friends, is a boy who loves math.
On the science front: We just had the science fair at Nate's school, and this was the most fun project we've ever done. We planted seven cute little bean plants and observed how depriving them of water, oxygen, soil, or sun affected them, and how adding fertilizer or letting them listen to a 9 hour playlist of classical favorites every night enhanced their growth. Certain results were unsurprising: Regular photosynthesized and grew like one might expect a properly sunned, watered, soiled, oxygenated plant to do, while No Oxygen and No Water didn't grow at all, although No Oxygen did grow some lovely mold around the edges. Other results were quite surprising: No Soil actually grew a few inches long (???); No Sun grew one skinny stalk straight up and was actually the tallest for the first 2 weeks; and Plus Fertilizer didn't grow a single sprout (the theory is that we over-fertilized and thus killed the poor thing). But the biggest surprise of all was Plus Mozart, which grew like crazy. Every day Nate took pictures and recorded his observations, and every day we saw Mozart beat the heck out of Regular: It was much taller, bushier, and darker green. I'm not much of a science buff, but it was seriously cool to see such blatant cause and effect. The whole family went nuts for it.
And Harry Potter: Our foray began, as most things do these days, with the Lego Wii version, which taught both kids everything they could ever want or need to know about Hogwarts and its inhabitants. Now we're watching the movies, ordering the inevitable Gryffindor t-shirts, and practicing spells around the house. "Wingardium Levowusa!" Jonah shouts at various objects, hoping against hope that he, too, will discover he is a secret wizard.
In other words, a lot of fun at the H house.
Friends and relations who have visited this blog for any amount of time have probably noticed a couple of things about the titular Nate Nate about which we sometimes beat a little around the bush. On the one hand, he has dealt with a perplexing set of challenges, which have resulted in copious amounts of therapy, everything from speech to occupational to social thinking to Lindamood-Bell. On the other hand, he has been dealt an equally perplexing set of strengths, with everything from crazy math skills to perfect pitch to the ability to memorize things like, oh, the phone numbers of everyone I know (age 2), the number of each house on our mile long street (age 4), and the amount of time, in minutes and seconds, of all 8 million songs on his iPod (ongoing).
In the biz, I believe this is known as "2e," which stands for twice-exceptional. Which means gifted and working a learning difference (millenial pc term for learning disability), all in one unique, fascinating, and, in our case, cute little person. Life with a guy who is all over the developmental map can be challenging, frustrating, and anxiety-producing at times, but on balance, it has got to be the most interesting and rewarding place to be. He's four and doing long division! He's six and can't tie his shoes. He transposes all of his piano lessons into different keys! He has never, in almost three years of elementary school, played at recess. He can translate any Arabic number into Roman and vice versa after five minutes of instruction; he gets so nervous about applause that the entire camp body has to snap instead of clap for him; he develops a system for identifying prime numbers; he is afraid to walk on grass; he is the only 2 year old I know who can spell "television" and "Bell Systems"; he can't identify any emotion other than happy, mad, or sad; he can tell you what day of the week any given date will fall on; he can't, for the longest time, figure out how to put on his pants. He eats only three foods, he has huge tantrums at the thought of driving anywhere for longer than ten minutes, he needs three years of reminders before his eye contact hits the 50% mark. He pioneers "states math" (substituting states for numbers, with each state's value determined by its order of admission to the union, wherein New Jersey (#3) times Kentucky (#15) equals Utah (#45)), he can "name that tune" with hundreds of songs in a single note, he won't walk up the stairs to his preschool classroom until I offer to let him count by 93s up the steps.
He is a little exhausting, a lot astonishing, and entirely fabulous. We love him so, so much.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, because I've spent most of the past 5 of his 7 years dealing with the hard stuff. I've read books, attended lectures and seminars, agonized through evaluations, met with specialists, brought him to countless therapy sessions, researched countless more, devoted hours and hours and hours to practicing what we learned in his therapies, joined chat groups and support groups, and worried incessantly that I should be doing more. I've cried at least a million tears and I've agonized over every decision. I've also celebrated victories that I had once assumed we would take for granted and then later thought we might never see. Like potty training, buttoning, drawing a picture of his family, riding a two-wheeler down the block until he was out of my sight.
But now, while the hard times are not completely over, we're shifting focus to the more fun side of the 2e, to the part where we unleash Nate's inner math fury. We finally felt ready to push forward in the areas where he's strong, trusting that he's caught up or at least on track in the more challenging areas. So we had him tested to figure out where to start, and it turns out that, across multiple tests, Nate "the Doog" H is, as has been long-suspected, a genuine math guy. It is, officially, his thing. The plan seems to be to catch him up to where his knowledge base matches his cognitive ability, which means we will likely be zooming through stuff like fractions and decimals and graphing over the next period of time (weeks? months? hours?) so that he can get the stimulation he needs from the math he loves.
Which brings us to today, doing his homework in a waiting room. It turns out that Nate's second grade teacher has started teaching him how to multiply with decimals. It will surprise no one who knows him that Nate's learning weapon of choice is to inflict whatever he's studying on me, strengthening his own understanding by forcing mine. There we sit, with him ordering me to complete longer and longer problems (we're talking multiplying 7 digit numbers by 7 digit numbers) under his tutelage. His eyes light up; he bounces in his chair, he is beaming from ear to ear. The good news is that I, too, am good at math; I am coming up with answers in my head, tossing out math facts, and challenging him right back.
The bad news is that I think I'm going to be out of my league in about 3 days.
In any event, we're really, really enjoying this new part of the ride. So if you're looking for me, I am, at least for now, taking a break from crying in therapists' offices. You might instead find me sitting under a tree with my weird little genius, waiting for just the right apple to bonk him on the head in just the right way for him to unlock the next great mystery of the universe.
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