shredded shirts and an IEP.....

Annual IEP for Spence this week. It was a good meeting but emotionally challenging. Spence is agitated. Through a lot of discussion I think we all figured out why. It is a new school, new and smaller classroom, some new classmates, new routine and a mountain of new boundaries to test.

(FYI for any administrators out there. If a little guy is starting at a brand new school with new classmates he isn't familiar with and a new routine.....DON'T transport him in the middle of the day BACK to his old school for an OT session and then send him back to class. AND it would be a good idea to send an aide with him on the bus so he won't be so disoriented. I was frustrated to hear about that. Nothing we could do because it was limited to three sessions. But still. The parents might want to know. )

Hence the barometer for his frustrations is the number of chew marks in his shirts. He had shredded ALL of them. All the cute ones I had picked out at Target with sporty stripes and WITHOUT graphic designs of skulls and skateboarders. (I like simple/conservative). It is only three weeks into the school year. Guy ended up going to the local thrift store and buying 50 of them to start over. I haven't even seen what he got.

Any-hoo....we are tweaking, slowly tweaking his day to see if we can minimize some problems. We meet again in four weeks to check our progress.

The one thing we could all agree on is that Spence is understimulated. He is a cyclone of energy and I had a great idea. We need a hamster wheel of a kind for him that is directly connected to his computer. He can run off some steam and that will power his games and videos.

I am happy with the working relationship I have with the administrators. The IEP was a good piece of work and we all agreed on what the problems and solutions need to be. But MAN! I still get so emotionally stirred up.

These are the thoughts screaming through my head. RAGE. The biggest disappointment has been that my little guys never learned to talk. All those thousands of hours of therapy didn't crack open the language code. I am very angry about that. I am angry that after a decade of trying our very best to be uber-consistent.....the boys' frustrations and behaviors are still mentally emotionally and physically draining. I am furious that even after both boys moving out 17 months ago, going on outings with them still gives me crippling anxiety.

What the heck was all that work for? It was supposed to fix it but it didn't.

But I had it all wrong from the beginning. The therapy wasn't for them.

It was for me.

I've been getting my PhD in IEP language, advocating skills and the art of compromise. I know those kids inside and out, upside down. I can smell crappy IEP goals a mile away and can see under-performing aides letting inappropriate behaviors get out of hand because they are too slow to react.

All of it was to teach our family what we need to do to keep these kiddos safe, healthy and happy for the next 70 years.