"Nor shall you do my ear that violence To make it truster of your own report Against yourself. I know you are no truant."

 J and I have been learning the hard way for at least the past seven years that being the youngest of the family is a completely different world than the one that we grew up in. People prize your cuteness and babyhood over your wisdom and maturity. No one takes you seriously. You have the least amount of physical and moral force in any disagreement with your older brothers.

And, for Felix, it's been uncomfortable and unsettling to watch him internalize the abuse (intentional or otherwise) that he gets from his older brothers. We've sat on the sofa after bedtime puzzling over the things we hear him saying, wondering whether we are going to need some extra help with him. And where we're going to get it. And whether it's fair to the other two. Or whether we're just imagining it.

But there certainly is no doubt that he pours out a stream of abuse about himself: "I'm dumb, I'm stupid, I can't read, I'm a dork..."

The child is an enigma to us, and I suspect that he is an enigma to himself. He has no context by which he can understand who he is. Why is he slower, shorter, and and apparently less clever than the two people he spends every day with? 

I don't know if we would have had the energy to even attempt homeschooling if we'd known at the outset that we'd be answering these sorts of questions.

We had a week of very light book-work this week and spent most of our school time taking a standardized test online. The state requires each of our boys to be formally evaluated at least once a year, and in the past we've used a teacher friend to administer a reading test. These tests are great, but the scoring is very complicated and doesn't mean much to the boys. (What does a 4F mean?)

Two years ago the school district got persnickety about the type of testing that James was doing, so we switched to a standardized cross-discipline multiple question test. The great thing about this test, we discovered afterwards, was that it gave you a comparison to the level of each boy relative to his peers. (Supposedly)

Do I really believe the levels that James and Owen scored at? Not particularly.

But they did very well, and they took great encouragement from the news that they are well above grade level in almost everything that they are doing.

Felix, who has struggled through every stage of learning to read for the past three years, did not want to take this test. He didn't like the mouse, he didn't like the computer, and he didn't like sitting through 50 questions per section.

But when we called him into the kitchen and told him that he was doing the work of a third grader in some subjects and scoring like a fifth grader in some others he absolutely BEAMED. He couldn't wait to tell the babysitter. He looked like he was floating with pride and delight.

J was quick to assure him that we would still love him and be proud of him even if he didn't do well at all on his test. He is (apparently) a little behind in Spelling, so we'll need to do some catch-up work with him on that.

But I think that on Monday morning it might be marginally less hard to convince him to start in on his schoolwork. And maybe, just maybe, he won't spend so much of the morning arguing that he's a dumb kid.