Interventions

The boys need an intervention.  A reading intervention, to be precise.

Ezra, who has amazing comprehension skills, can’t decode or spell to save his life. Zach, who started reading well at three and could read Harry Potter IN SPANISH by five, doesn’t really understand what he is reading.  Oy!

At last week’s IEP meeting for Ezra, the school district offered to help him two hours per week using a method known as Orton Gillingham.  But after researching online, reading a few journal articles, and talking to a few education professors, I really want to take both boys to a center that uses Lindamood Bell.

Blah, blah, blah.  Who cares, right?  Well, it gets more complicated.

Read this next section really fast, without pausing to breathe, and you’ll get a sense of what it’s like to live in my brain.

Lindamood Bell costs a ridiculous amount of money.  An amount I don’t want to specify because if we decide to do it, you may feel judgmental about how we spend money.  But I think it’s bad for Christians to stay all private and secret about how we spend money. How else can others challenge us that we’re not living out God’s call to use our money to love the poor?

It about $10K per kid.

Which is ridiculous.  But it’s the intervention that I think will actually work for my kids.  But we don’t have twenty thousand dollars.  But we’re refinancing, so maybe we could put it into the mortgage.

But I work with an eight grader who is dyslexic.  And she works her butt off and she wants to go to boarding school, and she’ll never get in because she can’t read.  Why should our kids go if she can’t go?  Well, maybe we could just put $30K into the mortgage.  That doesn’t make sense.  Why her and not the other kids who you know need help?  You can’t make decisions this way.  STOP AND PRAY!

Okay.  You can slow down again.

So I spent the afternoon crying, coming up with ways to justify spending the money, and throwing up desperate prayers for wisdom.  That’s it.  Not a very satisfying ending for a post, but it’s where I am tonight.  Maybe I need an intervention too.