I am back from the hospital and popped on to see if I am banned......I'm not.....yay!! Kerri ty for the compliment re my dyslexia, I am touched and quite proud that you didnt know and that it is not too obvious.

All my life I have had to work hard every day. At school until I was 10 I was labelled stupid and unteachable. I didnt know why I couldnt read, I just could not see what everyone else could. Then my step father came along, he was a teacher, newly trained as a mature student and he thought that maybe I just wasnt seeing the words. So gave me a reading book and sure enough I couldnt read it to him. Then he read another to me..... much harder, and then asked me to read it back to him which I did almost word perfect. He realised I wasn't actually reading it but had memorised it after hearing it just once. He did some other tests and decided that I wasn't stupid at all and on top of that had a remarkable memory.

He started to work with me using methods he made up as he learned how I learned, he learned to see what I saw.......he actually asked me what I saw on a page which no one had ever done, they had only yelled at me to see what they saw. He taught me patterns in words, those I couldn't get he just asked me to remember them. Within a year I was reading well, another year my reading age was above average. I still use the methods he taught me although to be honest I do it automatically so that usually I don't even know that I am doing it. Dont ask me for directions to a place though because it will be totally screwed up. I depend heavily on Mr Daisy when designing a quilt pattern or making a new applique. If i get all confused I call for him, tell him I need 'this' the other way round......something I simply cannot do. I cannot manage just to turn something around or reverse it. He comes into the sewing room and 'flips' and marks with pen. Always red for left and blue for right. Then I am ok.

I went to univercity, did a law degree and earned a living all thanks to my Step Father. Also thanks to my secretary for 25 years. Jean used to colourcode my notes for court so I could find things. My briefs were always a rainbow of coloured paper which facinated other lawyers. She worked out the method and stuck to it for all those years.

I will always be grateful to these two people

When I realised my eldest daughter had the same problem, the first thing I said to her was....you are not stupid!! She learned in a simular way to me and while the school was much better than they were in my day, her Granda did the same for her as he did for me. Such a special man. Sadly he died before she graduated from uni, but she dedicated her degree in Geotechnic Engineering to him.

Nowadays, computors and spell checks make life easier but once your brain is trained to remember, with my type of dyslexia it only occasionally forgets. ~(usually in the middle of a star block in my case lol)