J., we went through a similar situation--our daughter developed petit mal seizures at age 6. Like you said, for a while we thought she was ignoring us. Then we realized there was a pattern to it, and when we started paying attention to that, we noticed she was having them every 5 or so minutes, fo5 5-10 seconds each.
After first seeing our pediatrician, we went to Children's Mercy Neurology for the EEG. Our daughter was confirmed as having absence seizures and they prescribed Zarontin. We worked with Christine Klebes there...a nurse practitioner and wonderful to us. She said that many children who develop this at a young age will grow out of it, and that they prescribe medication for two years. After two years, the child is taken off medication and, in many cases, the seizures do not return.
We did just that...taking the meds for two years. We saw a complete elimination of seizures on Zarontin after two weeks. She is 9 years old now and we just took her off the meds last February. She's been seizure-free ever since! She went for a check-up recently and they (and we) believe she has a good chance of being seizure free for life.
I would encourage you to continue to ask questions and, if you haven't already, find a doctor that you feel very comfortable with and confident in. It took us awhile to do that and it made a big difference. We also contacted the local Epilepsy Foundation and got a huge packet of information. Most importantly, there's a list of doctors in there that specialize in epilepsy, and several pediatric specialties, too.
If you'd like to talk more, please feel free to email me at ____@____.com last thought--we spent a lot of time trying to help our daughter feel as normal as possible. So important and heart wrenching! Instead of her sleeping over at others houses, we had them at our house. She even decided she wanted to share her experiences with her class, so that they understood. These things went a long way to helping her feel some control over something that was in nobody's control.