Dysgraphia.

As I've mentioned before, my youngest son has some issues with handwriting. I'm not sure if it is truly dysgraphia.  I looked it up and here's the definition.

"People with dysgraphia usually can write on some level, and often lack other fine motor skills and may be cross dominant, finding tasks such as tying shoes difficult. It often does not affect all fine motor skills. They can also lack basic grammar and spelling skills (for example, having difficulties with the letters p, q, b, and d), and often will write the wrong word when trying to formulate thoughts (on paper)"

Okay.  Yes.  This is it in a nutshell.  He has all of this.  He was evaluated by an occupational therapist today and she said that even though he's right handed, he kind of presents as a lefty.  So there's the cross dominant part.  He finds tying shoes difficult.  He's good with grammar, does okay with Sequential Spelling which is for dyslexics and reverses some letters.

I've been trying to get some help with this for a while.  Last summer before school started, I called a bunch of physical therapists and asked them about this but no one seemed to know what I was talking about. Finally, when my older son was in physical therapy I asked the staff there if they could do something.  They said that they could.  I took a sample of his handwriting to his pediatrician and she agreed with me and said that he should see an occupational therapist.   I didn't want to do both physical therapy for my oldest and occupational therapy for my youngest at the same time, so I waited a while and finally took him today.

It's hard when you are a homeschooler and have a child who is having a difficulty like this because everyone looks at you like you should sent him immediately to public school.    I'm not sure that he would have done well in school.  I think that this difficulty would have embarrassed him and would have been hard on his self image.  We try to minimize it around here. There's so much else that he does well and nobody's good at everything, right?  I do want him to have basic legible writing but to get to that point, we've got a lot of work to do.