Thank you to The European Mama for your review of I Believe in You. Here’s a snippet of the what she had to say:

It describes very well how it feels like to have SPD- imagine you’d put on your scratchiest sweater, put on headphones with the music turned on too loud and look at the sun without sunglasses. Michele can explain perfectly how a normally developing child can watch somebody use scissors and then do the same, but a child with dyspraxia would have to be thought how to use each and every one of her fingers seperately in order to learn the same thing.

I greatly appreciate the way Michele wrote this book: in a very conversational tone- she writes like she speaks. What I also loved about this book is the fact that Michele is always comparing the rather difficult past and the much easier present- Elizabeth is 12 at the time of writing.

Michele writes about how her child was different from her first one, and caused family and friends to be very worried. At the age of 5, Elizabeth was diagnozed with SPD and dyspraxia and before that, she wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t touch sand or grass with her feet and had many more problematic behaviours. She would have frequent ear infections. Healthcare professionals seemed to ignore the problems. Finally, a family member told Michele the truth: that Elizabeth had SPD.