Blue Hair Victory!

We had a MAJOR breakthrough today concerning little tornado boy's Sensory Processing Disorder and haircuts! We tried getting his hair cut at a salon when he was a weenie little one and it was a nightmare. The memories are all still there in my head....screaming, crying...complete fight or flight mode while daddy tried to hold him on his lap in the hair chair and all of us in tears at the end. After 2-3 attempts like this, we said enough because we didn't want to traumatize him anymore. So....I became his hair dresser...yes, hahahahahaha is all I can say! Haircuts happened in the bathtub with me doing a total song and dance to keep him occupied while I did a snip here and a snip there. By the time I was done, I was exhausted but his hair was cut (for the most part). His hair was always pretty straight but FAR from looking professional.

For the past several months I kept pointing out that there was a new place called Snip-its down the road where he could play games while they cut his hair because lately the little hairs around his ears have been really bugging him. He was interested but not enough to convince him to try it. His love of the past month is his new DS system and he asked me the other day that if he tried getting his hair cut at the "new place" could he earn a new DS game. I agreed a million percent and today we ventured in to get his hair cut. There were a few slight stressful moments when she pulled out the electric razor tool to get around his ears and I just held his hands. The lady asked how he wanted it cut and he said he wanted to look like daddy. Daddy has short on the sides and then spikey in the front (and he frosts his spikes- but we are not ready for that yet!) Then he found out that he could put color on his hair and that was all he needed to hear to finish out the cut. He was thrilled with the gel that was put in to make his hair "pointy" and then the blue streaks were the icing on the cake. As we walked out the door he yelled, "I want to do that again and next time I am getting orange streaks". He was SO proud walking around showing off his hair for the rest of the afternoon.
Another SPD battle finally fought and WON!

Unschooling adventures

Since the holidays, my husband and I have made the decision that "typical" homeschooling was just not the answer for our 2e child. After lots of research and soul searching we realized that we have been unschooling him pretty much since birth...we just didn't know there was a name for it.

Unschoolers believe, "that the use of standard curricula and conventional grading methods, as well as other features of traditional schooling, are counterproductive to the goal of maximizing the education of each child. Instead, unschoolers typically allow children to learn through their natural life experiences, including game play, household responsibilities, and social interaction.....Unschoolers often claim that learning any specific subject is less important than learning how to learn..."

We have been facilitating his interests and explorations since birth and unschooling is the perfect match for his gifted/2e issues....so we are officially an unschooling family. He has explored and learned about topics that most kids don't touch on until the upper grades or later - binary numbers, dwarf planet criteria, weather systems. In our explorations we are hitting all the major subject areas of reading, math, history, science and even go into art and music among other areas. He just isn't sitting and doing a workbook and sit down lesson that usually separates all of these subjects out into boring capsules. He is learning real time situations where you can use specific math facts in order to help solve a problem instead of looking at useless math problems stuck in a workbook.

He really loves to play boardgames....but not the typical boardgames that 6 year olds like...his favorite is Monopoly and I think we have 3 different versions of it and he is RUTHLESS when he plays. So the other day, out of the blue he told me that he wanted to make his own monopoly game. He asked me to help with the writing and coloring and that he would come up with everything else. I believe we are the only people on the planet who have a Monopoly game that has a space for a Tickle Factory
and an Invisible Factory! For almost 2 hours, we worked together as he designed his own gameboard (complete with his own street names) and then came up with the costs for each property and their rents and then we proceeded to play his Monopoly game. He was SO incredibly proud of his accomplishment. So he followed his interest and in doing so he learned math, reading, writing, and art....and of course he beat me by a mile!

"You cannot teach a person anything; you can only help him find it within himself." -Galileo