6.17.2009

Special Needs Excursions and Other Grand Finales!

You may wonder what the heck is up with all this week's travel and outings posts: They were the groundwork for this week's BlogHer Post: Hell No, We Won't Stay Home: Excursions With Special Needs Kids. Please check it out, and if you have any tips of your own, please leave them in the BlogHer post comments section.

More BlogHer fun: A call went out a few weeks ago, requesting parents' perspectives on kids and caffeine, and I responded. Wouldn't you know, they slapped my ramblings into the video! You would think someone would have told me about my facial tics before this point:





Other news: Today is Iz's last day of 5th grade and elementary school. I am choosing not to think too much about having an almost-middle-schooler.

We will celebrate with the obligatory McDonald's meal (I got sick of her asking for McD's when she was little, and told her that our family only ever goes on the last day of school. I still have to make good on that improvisation, every year). Then tonight we will put her solo little bottom on a plane to San Diego, where she will meet up with my mother, they'll fly to Washington DC, and spend a week on Chesapeake Bay with two of my brothers and their families.

Today is also Mali's last day of preschool. FREEEK. Only great big school kids for us after today. She is still as amusing though now more devilish than darling, and she never ceases to suprise us in that she actually pays attention to her environment and figures things out independently. I learned this when I went to retrieve her from the backyard, and was greeted by a hose blast to the chest. No one around here showed her how to turn on the hose or manipulate its sprayer head, or expected her to have the fine motor skills for that task. So, impressive as well as infuriating.

Leelo is off school this week, but is being a good sport about having a different routine. His amiability is extending towards food tolerance as well: he ate the cornmeal pancakes we've been urging him to try for seven years -- with syrup, even -- and also voluntarily tried meat for the first time in his life (bacon, of course. I have witnesses).

I also found out that he will have the classroom we requested for next year, and that it will have only nine rather than twelve students. Whew. It's across the hall from his current room, and the teacher already works with his current teacher, so the transition should be less stressful than a move to a new site, and we can work on getting him used to the new environment during summer school.

It was suggested that we move him to a less restrictive classroom, but Seymour and I, as well as his teacher and Supervisor M, are not convinced that he's ready. I really want him to have a good winter -- the real test of his temperamental equilibrium -- before we'll consider moving him out of his segregated site.

The end of the school year has been a typical stress nexus for Seymour and me, but I think we're through with the worst of it. Summer begins, for real, tomorrow.

4 comments:

  1. Personally, I would not give my children soda. In fact I don't even give them juice - they can have milk or water or (occasionally) iced tea. And our pediatrician LOVES me. So with that insight into my frame of reference, what bothered me the most about the women in that segment was how insanely busybodyish and judgmental they sounded. Yikes - there were some freaks.

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  2. What facial tic? You look gorgeous. Jealous that D gets to see you this week!

    I think the vid-makers needed to draw a stronger line between objections to soda/Red Bull/coffee because of sugar content and objections because of caffeine content. It's two totally separate issues....for me anyway.

    Glad your summer seems to be kicking off to a good start.

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  3. Didn't have time to register so that I could comment on the BlogHer post, but I just wanted to say a quick thank you. I have a very different kind of disability (purely physical, use a wheelchair), so I'm not going to pretend to know what these outings are like for you and your family, but I want you to know that I appreciate your persistence. I get so tired of being the only person with a recognizable disability in a public place. People are not going to fully accept us in the community until they're used to us being in the community, which can't happen if we're not out there. Now that I'm a young adult, I always try to give smiles and supportive vibes to people I notice with special needs kids... but I hope it doesn't just look like more staring/pity.

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  4. Anonymous7:15 AM

    I agree. What facial tics???

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Respectful disagreement encouraged.