I knew this would happen

Marcus has been at school for four days.

Today, his teacher asked me if I had any summary reports from his daycare. When I said no, she said that she’s concerned about his distractibility. When they had an assembly he couldn’t stay still and she has trouble getting him to focus. She also said not to worry, that at the moment she’s essentially gathering data to develop a plan to work on the problem.

I’m very sad to hear it, but I’m not in the least surprised.

Marcus does have real trouble focussing and he is very easily distracted. Dave and I knew it could be a problem at school. We made a choice not to tell the school about it or that he’s an ex-premature baby because we didn’t want to set up any preconceived ideas, but we were ready to add that information into the mix if there were issues about it.

I expected there to be. But I did expect it to take longer than four days.

One of the things the developmental psychologist told us when he had his four year old checkup, was that we weren’t to let teachers try to tell as he had ADHD as if he had those sorts of problems, they would be from his prematurity instead. But that clearly implied that he was likely to have some of the same symptoms. We’d been hoping he was about the same as other kids, but if the teacher has noticed it already, I guess that hope hasn’t been realised.

Marcus is such a bright, intelligent kid that it breaks my heart to think he might not be able to reach his great potential because of prematurity issues. (The teacher did add that he knew lots about letters and numbers and not to worry about those – I knew that too.)

So I’m feeling a little sad this evening. I hope we can work on this and develop strategies for him so that he can overcome this, but it still makes me sad.