THE LONG AND TWISTED ROAD TO VISION THERAPY

If you have found this post without any knowledge of our VISION THERAPY STORY,  then you might want to start HERE, but you don't have to.  What follows is the LONG version, above links you to the shorter (but still long) version.  If you have a child struggling to read then I suggest you start with the ABOVE link so you can see right away how WONDERFUL this story ends.....

If you know our story, then read on.....

How do you condense a story lasting almost 8 years into a nice, neat package and then present it in a way to others so that the story moves them enough to want to learn more or maybe even get involved.  This is the question I ask myself at 3:30 in the morning when I bolt upright, wide awake and wishing that other children's lives could be improved in the same way my daughter's life has been improved.

First, lets go back 8 years.  Alli is 6 months old and refuses to crawl, she wants nothing to do with it. She will stand holding your hand, she will stand holding furniture and she will sit up, but she will not crawl.  I hate to admit it, but I went online to research "children who never crawl" and I found some sites stating that children who never crawl might have learning and reading problems later.  She never did crawl, EVER, not even once across the kitchen floor.  She was walking at 10 months.  I tried to not let it bother me, but in the back of my mind I started to worry that she would struggle in school, before she was even ONE YEAR OLD. 

 I was a whiz kid, taught myself to read before kindergarten and never had to study through school.  My husband was not so fortunate.  He was a resource student from 2nd grade until 9th grade.  He has a college degree and is a very successful high school science teacher but school was always MUCH harder for him and  reading and spelling are still challenging for him to this day!  


I wanted Alli to be like me, I loved school and I loved to learn.  It made me sad to think that there were children who did not like school and that it was possible MY CHILD might not enjoy school.  I made sure we read for HOURS every day, and she LOVED it.  Even as a one year old, she would sit by herself for 30 - 45 minutes at a time and look through books. 

Let's move on to Alli as a TWO year old.  She is smart, active, and healthy.  She is an early talker, speaking complete sentences by 2.5, SMART KID, right?  YEP, but don't try to teach her anything.   We can snuggle and read books for hours, she looks at the pictures, but if I say, "Can you point to the cat?"  She will get very upset and say "Mommy, just read!"  

One more year goes by and Alli is THREE.  We do not have a TV and 90% of the girl's time is spent outside.  If we are inside, then 90% of their time is spent being read to or doing art.  Alli has the vocabulary of most 5 year olds, with clear and strong pronunciation.  She has an amazing memory for details.  If I misplace something and ask her if she has seen it she closes her eyes and says,  "Oh, I know where it is!" and runs off to get it.  She can recite passages from the books we read and tells me "Mommy, you skipped part of the story!" if I try to go quicker through a book.  

All of this tells me she's SMART, right?  I just keep telling myself that because my mommy gut is telling me something is off. She cannot catch a ball - even a large one, to save her life.  It is like she doesn't see it until it smacks her in the face.   So, we just don't play sports because obviously she doesn't enjoy them.  And although she loves to be read to she will NEVER look at the words.  She will study the pictures, but not the words.  It is like the words are not even there.  

There are other things that worry me, but I just dont know why....or what to do about it.  For example, she will not do jigsaw puzzles with me.  Even the large floor puzzles, she refuses to do them. Jill is one year old and SHE enjoys this stuff, but Alli wont do any of it. When we look at the magazine "HIGH FIVE" she makes me skip the hidden pictures.  She doesn't WANT to find the hidden butterfly and mitten.  The list goes on and on.....not interested in blocks, legos, coloring, dot to dots, eye spy, Where's Waldo......but she has so many things she IS interested in and things she is good at, that I focus on those.   

It is so rare that we would play with blocks, I had to take a picture the first time Alli spent a whole 10 minutes making a tower with me.

Alli is 4 years and 2 month the first time she colors in a coloring book on her own accord.   Jill was starting to want to color, at 18 months, so Alli gave it a shot.  She preferred to draw her own pictures so she wouldn't have to worry about all those lines.  Again, I had to take a picture.....I remember being so excited!! 

At FIVE years old, after a year and a half of preschool, she still does not know her letters or numbers, and she could care less.   I tried to make it fun, but she wants nothing to do with any of it.  I start thinking about homeschooling.  How would she ever survive in a classroom?

At her five year annual check up she has 20/40 eyesight so we are told to take her for an eye exam where .......SHOCKING......... it is determined that she needs glasses.  I wont even get into the mommy guilt I had from not thinking even once, "Oh, maybe she cant see." I guess I thought she would say, "This is all blurry."  I did not realize that her reality is her reality.  She doesn't know what the world looks like through other's eyes, she only knows what she knows and if the world was never clear, why would she expect anything different.  

We get her the glasses and I am so excited to start our new life together with her LOVING to do all the things she has refused to do.  Instead, she refuses to wear the glasses.  I remember when I was 10, getting glasses and thinking "WOW, trees have little individual leaves....WOW, people's faces have defined features....WOW, I am never taking these glasses off."  I loved that the world was in focus.  So when Alli refused to wear the glasses I took her back in.  They rechecked her.  They said, "Oh, maybe she was over dilated....it looks like she doesn't need glasses"  Back to square one for us.  Kindergarten is quick approaching and I really don't feel happy about it.

 I talked a little about homeschooling our girls, but I got so much flack from people I just started keeping that idea to myself.  I decided that if I ever was going to homeschool, it would be good to say I at least TRIED public school.  

I couldn't imagine her in a regular classroom.  At 5.5 years old she still didn't know her letters or numbers.  She could barely write her name and even if she did, it was often completely backwards.  I had done many hours of research about different learning styles and decided that the Waldorf approach would be the best fit for her. Highly art and music based education, where kindergarten is just PLAY, no formal academics whatsoever. Academics start slowly in 1st grade with letters sounds and numbers 1 - 10, and a love of learning is emphasized over teaching to a test.  

Starting kindergarten was an emotionally draining ordeal (long story for another time) but eventually with time (2 - 3 months) Alli grew to at least accept being there.  They sang and danced and did art and played outside, rain or shine.  It was the most wonderful school experience she could have had. However,  I saw no reason to make her endure 6 hours of school for first grade.  Her last day of kindergarten at the "fly away" ceremony, she flew (as fast as she could)  to me instead of the first grade teacher.  All she really wanted was to be with Jill and I.

Notice Jill hanging onto Alli.  These girls just want to be together all the time.  This was the last day of kindergarten.

I start our FIRST GRADE school year with HIGH expectations.  I start to think, "This will be the year it all clicks.  She has one on one attention, everything will be story and art based, she will LOVE it." And she did love all the stories and activities and so did Jill ....writing and reading were not so great....

We went S - L -O - W, slower than you can even imagine, and she still struggled.  She seemed to learn her letters and sounds ok, but her writing was atrocious.  She could not write straight either, letters went up and down and varied in size tremendously.  She wrote so huge that I had to put in 3 inch lines to try and fit 4 letters on a page.  

This is her page for the number 3.  Notice how much trouble she had writing a 3 and wrote the number 2 in numerous places.  (Remember, she is 6.5 years old...we are a year behind because of Waldorf Curriculum...so confusing!!)

 I am not exaggerating when I say we would read for 3 hours a day (the three of us on the couch, me reading to them).  An hour in the morning, an hour after lunch and an hour after dinner.  I started to think maybe it was my fault, that I read so much to them that Alli had no reason to learn to read on her own.  I considered telling her I was not going to read to her anymore unless she started reading at least SOME to me, but that just felt wrong.  I was homeschooling them to be together, to be able to sit and read for hours if that is what they wanted to do.

Remember, she never did crawl, EVER, not even once across the kitchen floor. My fear was becoming a reality.  I started to lower my expectations and just be grateful I could homeschool her and save her from the ridicule I assumed she would get in a classroom full of kids who knew all this stuff, and learned it easily.

I did not think we could go much slower than we were.  We took an entire week to learn one number at a time so around November we were at number 7 and all seemed to be going ok, not great, but not terrible.  Lots of numbers were written backward and even adding simple numbers was too difficult for her.  But then during the next week, when we learned about 8, she suddenly could not tell 7 and 8 apart.  I felt so grateful to be homeschooling and able to just STOP everything and focus on getting her un-confused.....but I also started to wonder what was wrong.  Jill was learning these numbers without any trouble, even writing most of them correctly (learning through osmosis: she sat in my lap for Alli's school lessons).   Alli was brilliant, really, in so many other ways, what was going wrong?  

Alli could BARELY do what I wanted her to do, which was already very little.  By the end of the year we were writing word families and maybe a 5 word sentences.  She could "read" her entire school book, but it was memorized, she still could not tell me even one word out of context, well she knew CAT.  At the end of a 10 minute lesson she was EXHAUSTED.  Literally, EXHAUSTED!!  She would be yawning profusely, her eyes would be bloodshot and sometimes every tear up.  

In April of first grade, Alli and I are doing math on the couch.  Jill is sitting in my lap and we have a 100's chart in front of us:

I say to Alli, "Do you know what 85 is?" 

She says "8 - 5" 

I say, "Yep, can you point to it?"

She stares BLANKLY at the chart

Then.....

Jill points to the number

I freak out a little bit and then all of the sudden I remember - we have Alli's reading glasses from when she was 5 in the closet.  I pull them out and grab a piece of paper with size 10 font.  I point to the letters and ask Alli to tell me them.  Out of 14 letters, she gets 10 wrong.  I have her put the glasses on....she gets all 14 letters correct.   I will not go into the mommy guilt that ONCE AGAIN I have overlooked the most simply solution.  Or maybe it was a more complex problem after all.

Around this occurance, I recalled a cousin of Shane's telling me how her son learned to read but had some pretty severe vision issues and they were only resolved once he went to an Optometrist for Vision Therapy.  I thought back to all the problems Alli was having and thought maybe it would make sense that she would have a visual or processing problem....she was so SMART answering questions or reciting a story or even answering math problems out loud.....but NOTHING written down was easy for her.  Whatever was in her brain could not be accessed through her eyes, that was clear.

Three days later, Alli and I are at the eye doctor.   I took her back to the same Ophthalmologist - BIG MISTAKE.  I did ask for a different doctor and told them how unhappy I had been about how we had been treated in 2010 and they informed me that he had left and we would see their most recommended doctor.  

We start with the assistant who hands Alli a piece of paper with different sized paragraphs and asks Alli to point to the place on this sheet where she can see words. Alli says, "I cant see any words." The letters at the bottom of the chart were HUGE!!! Probably one inch high and in BOLD font.  I was heartbroken for my little girl. All this time we had spent sitting on the couch reading, no wonder she didn't care about the tiny details, she couldn't see them. I felt guilty all over again for not coming to this conclusion earlier in the year.  

The eye doctor comes in and I explain our history and ask about vision therapy, saying maybe Alli has a visual processing problem.   I am told, 

"Those don't exist. Don't be fooled into thinking that is going to help.  The colored overlays do not help, vision therapy wont help either.  It is a waste of your time and your money.  Alli is far sighted and needs to wear glasses for school work."

We get the glasses but I still decide to look into Vision Therapy.  I find lots of mixed reviews online.  I also find there in no one in Chico who does it.  My choices:   Drive to Roseville to do VT, move to Olympia where my in-laws live to do VT, or make Alli wear the glasses ALL THE TIME for school and see what happens. She is SEVEN and she finally knew her letters and sounds and the numbers 1 - 10.  Maybe something would click in 2nd grade.  

First day of Kindergarten for Jill and 2nd Grade for Alli.  Jill has clear glasses so she can be just like her sister.

We start second grade with high expectations again.  After a summer of rest I was hoping Alli would start to show some renewed interest in learning to read on her own.  I was also hopeful that the glasses would help her see what we do more clearly and therefore she could learn more easily.

It was a HUGE struggle to get her to wear the glasses.  She never wanted to.  Every time I walk into the living room and the girls are sitting on the couch looking at books Alli NEVER had her glasses on.

For Christmas we get her 6 pairs of reading glasses.  I put them all over the house.  By the couch, in the schoolroom, in the guest room, anywhere she might look at books.  She still wont put them on unless I ask her to.

Midway through 2nd grade Alli is still struggling to learn anything. She knew the word THE now, but not much else.  She still wrote in mostly capitals even though I wrote in only lower case.  She could not read me any of the sentences we wrote and she was still exhausted after about 10 minutes of close work.  Glasses were not the miracle cure I was hoping they would be.

Math however had become a piece of cake for her.  I planned on teaching her place value over a 4 week period of time because that seemed like the rate it would take her to learn something so complex.  She got it the first day.  By that night she could add 4 digits together correctly.  Even when I introduced Carrying, she got it the first day....I was blown away and SOOOOO excited that something was finally easy for her.

I had begun using flash cards to try and get Alli to at least know some sight words.  This was a huge success.  We could go through my stack of about 50 sight words and Alli could say most of them relatively quickly.  What I did not understand though....she still could NOT recognize any of these same words in the easy reader books I was trying to get her to read to me.  For example, in the sentence below she knew all of these words and could read them to me on flash cards.  

THE CAT AND DOG SAT ON THE MAT.

But if I asked her to read it as a sentence in a book, she would say something like 

THE CAN SOG  TON THE METS.

I finally asked the teacher at our school (who we turn our work in to for the state) what I had been dreading to ask for the last 1.5 years.  "When do we test for Learning Disabilities?" I couldn't even ask her this without crying.  I knew that all kids develop at different rates.  I had wanted to believe for SO LONG that one day it was just going to CLICK for her and reading would happen.  I felt like we had exhausted that time frame.

Her teacher told me, "She is a smart girl, she is going to get it.  Just keep doing what you are doing."  I kept that in the front of my mind for the next few months even though nothing about reading became any easier for her.

Then one day in March, as fate would have it, my sister went to her annual eye exam.  She saw a flier there for a new eye doctor who was doing Vision Therapy and guess what........

This is Jill holding a book that Alli struggled to read 6 months ago and Alli holding the book she can read now, after 6 months of Vision Therapy.  Isnt the look on Alli's face a clear indicator of how life transforming this has been....

Read our Journey from DAY ONE of Vision Therapy to  A NEW LIFE after Vision Therapy
 HERE