And the child you just know it isn't right with, isn't yours? Not in any legal sense, anyway.
Ever since I met Stella, I've suspected that she wasn't quite where she should be developmentally. In the cognitive sense. Even when I met her for the first time (which was under circumstances of terrible stress, imposed by her mother), she seemed... behind. But it was hard to put my finger on it.
I met her when she had just turned four years old. She's small for her age. Height-wise, she's on target, but weight-wise, she's very low. What's amazing to me is that she has consistently, since toddler-hood, according to Elfy, eaten whatever you give her. (Having two obscenely picky eater boys, this is fascinating to me.) However, she only eats a few bites (usually), and then just isn't interested in eating again for a while.
She was never read to (again, according to Elfy) until she came to our house. It just wasn't something that Elfy and Floja did. Neither of them had been raised that way, so they didn't pass it down. So when she experienced our nightly book time as a family, she couldn't get enough! I began to think it was simply a matter of her not having been read to, or exposed to much 'educational' stuff.
So we got out the toddler puzzles - the alphabet, numbers 1-10, colors and shapes, etc. She liked fitting them back into place, but didn't seem to have any memory of them from one time to the next (whether it was the same weekend, or two weeks apart), and she didn't seem to be associating the items together. It was more like a rote experience, in my observation.
I started to wonder if there might be something more going on.
Stella's birthday is in mid-December, so she didn't qualify for going to Kindergarten until this school year. So in the fall of 2009, she qualified for Head Start, and would have really benefited from it (who wouldn't, honestly??), but for reasons that remain a mystery to us, Floja decided that she would be better off remaining in the home daycare facility full time. Even the daycare provider recommended that she go to Head Start. Floja used some sort of excuse about the bus schedule interfering with her work schedule, and that because Elfy left her (a year prior to this), she was now unable to trust anyone to help her take care of the children. Apparently, her own mother and others in her family that have helped with all three of her children throughout all of their lives were suddenly not an option.
Are you getting my sarcasm here? But I digress.
So throughout last school year, Stella was in home daycare. She would have problems on a fairly regular basis with keeping her hands to herself, and/or being mean to other kids. We noticed that she would have trouble focusing on an activity (no matter what it was) for very long - most of the time, not long enough to finish the activity. She would not sit in front of the TV for more than a few minutes at a time (not that that is so bad! just not very typical), she would want Elfy to color with her, then not be able to finish the picture they were working on together, etc.
The preschool teach that Jimmy had at the time, who is also a friend, agreed to come to our house and do some informal assessment for us of Stella. I was particularly concerned that no matter how much we worked with her (and we worked with her a lot), she could not remember the names of colors. At age four. Her speech was also not developed as well as the children in Jimmy's preschool class, who were all a full year (and some, even more) younger than her.
The teacher came to our house and interacted with Stella informally at the chalkboard, and noticed that she could match colors together correctly (i.e. it was not color blindness), but that she couldn't seem to name them. She sat down with us and gave us a copy of an assessment form (some five pages) that she uses in the preschool to assess development.
I noticed as I went through it that there were several areas of cognitive, speech and social development that were just a little 'off' with Stella for her age. They were more appropriate for what was considered 'average' for children a year or so younger than her.
I started talking to Elfy about having her evaluated more formally. My concern was that a critical window was closing in her young development where early intervention and support might really benefit her the most.
But...
Elfy doesn't have any sort of guardian relationship with Stella. There is no formal, documented relationship between them at all. We tried about a year ago to establish a formal relationship through creating a document that we could all agree upon, sign with an attorney and have noterized - just to give Elfy (and me) some sort of legal relationship with Stella, but Floja's response was a flat denial. In fact, she was so angered by the request that my name be put on Stella's daycare card as someone authorized to pick her up and drop her off, that she ended up pulling her away from us for nearly three months.
But I digress.
My point is that I have thought for more than a year now that Stella REALLY needs to be evaluated by a professional. But because we can't have it done (legally or formally), and there is so much animosity with her mother, we're at a loss.
So now she's in Kindergarten. At the first parent/teacher conferences in November, she scored waaaaay below the range of where she's 'supposed' to be at this point. The teacher recommended having her start attending an after-school session a couple of days a week to receive extra help and attention on learning her letters, numbers, counting and colors. If she made any other recommendations to have her more formally evaluated for cognitive developmental delay, we don't know about it. We weren't invited to attend the conferences.
Stella has also started having more social problems. She has hit, kicked or antagonized other kids in her class so often that there's a note taped to her desk that says, "I will keep my hands and my feet to myself." UG takes her to school every morning, and makes her recite it out loud. Nice.
She's become increasingly antagonistic towards Jimmy, our younger son. She and Max get along like best friends most of the time, but she is downright mean to Jimmy more often than not. And recently, there have been a few occasions on which Max has stood up to her and gotten angry at her for being mean to him or to Jimmy, or because she just won't play nicely with them.
Stella has gotten very good at copying what she sees. She can copy just about any word that you put in front of her. But ask her what the letters are, and most of the time, she doesn't know. She's gotten better on colors, but when you ask her what color something is, she looks to the side, says, "Ummmm...." and then answers. To me, that looks like a clear sign that she's not making the connection like most of us do. There's a disconnect.
I feel so very helpless! I am terrified that she's going to fall between the cracks of the system. She's going to struggle mightily through school, just barely getting by. Elfy and I are both worried that she's going to have so little self-confidence and self-respect if she continues on this path that she'll wind up a pregnant teenager, or worse, take her own life.
So this is a post where I'm asking - pleading - for your help. If you have any suggestions, ideas, or directions in which you can point us, I'm listening. And thanks for listening to me.
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