Finally Friday and here comes Christmas Vacation!

Today is the last day of school at Gow, until the new year. The boy is half way through his school year (in terms of grading, anyway.)That means that our fabulous 13 year old will now have two weeks of, hard earned, freedom. If we would let him, he would probably leave a permanent butt print on our couch by playing "minecraft", stopping only for basic necessities.

Truth be told, he has probably earned a couple of days of rest... but his parents are mean, unreasonable, lazy people who see him as our personal slave (snicker.) And, so, there will be daily lists of chores for him to do, and then, nightly, harping to have him do the chores the right way. Ahhhh, 'tis the season, right?

 For those of you that are unfamiliar with Gow, the boys dress in a sport coat and tie, dress slacks, nice shoes, etc. daily. (as seen in the group pic from the first day of school, below)

Their work day is about 12 hours long with athletics between their regular classes and their mandatory study hall. The kids start with breakfast at 7:30 and end at 8:30 after the evening study hall- so calling him our slave might be an understatement.

Seriously, though, this schedule reflects the truth about learning when you have dyslexia; you have to work twice as hard as everyone else if you want to be successful in the "real" world. As wonderful as adaptive technology is, there are still some truths that cannot be avoided. Writing takes an interminably long time. I'm not talking about forming the thoughts- Zack can tell a story and re-tell story events like nobody's business, although he may not remember the exact order that they happened . Sometimes, he's a little hard to follow, but that's just because his brain is moving much faster than mine. It's just that the physical act of writing is an immense chore. Zack uses a computer program to help him with this process, using predictive spelling, but it is still an agonizing process, frought with (lack of) capitalization and punctuation and, plenty of,  frustration.

Back to the original thought (way, way, waaaaaay up there at the top); Zack gets two weeks of vacation, so,  for the next week he will work very hard at slacking. Never ONCE will he utter the word "bored" because he won't want to risk a longer list of chores. He IS for hire, and he comes dirt cheap, so send a text/email/smoke signal if you'd like to put him to work!