The forgotten school in service week

Above: Aaron gets out two puzzles. mixes up the pieces. builds one puzzle. builds the other on top of the first.

Aaron's early special ed school is closed down for "in service" this week. Naturally, like a dork, I forgot that yesterday before dropping him off at the sitter's. Now he's convinced that it's "school closed down now" .......like, forever. NO amount of discussion will convince him otherwise. He's kinda bummed about it. Obviously he'll learn that its open next week. This sunday we will go on the Mount Hood Railway's Pumpkin Patch Express. His first train ride. Hay Maze(hmmm, not sure how he'll react to that. it'll be ok, it'll be ok, it'll be ok) Pumpkin Patch(also his first) He'll be wearing his new spiderman costume(which he doesn't yet know about, but has expressed a wanting of)

I or her mother almost always made my daughter's costumes(she's 27 now, she can bloody well make her own;-). partially out of creative intent, partially out of fianancial necessity. I kind of fell guilty about just going out and buying Aarons. Hmmm - fell, not feel guilty - Fruedian slip? We always have bought his. It's not that we have so much more money than Amelia's mother & i did, just less time. He's always enjoyed them. That makes it ok, right? right? not a bad daddy, not a bad daddy....not.....Whew, get a GRIP man! "it's not like yee pee'd in the wee laddie's cherrios ye knoo!" Sorry, too much Terry Pratchet Wee Free Men.......or maybe coffee.........

Going for my six month dental check up at the huge local medical university complex this afternoon (locally it's called Pill-Hill)....no dental insurance and they're really cheap-and good.

Working on reproducing the lost "Schedual-C" from last year's taxes for the City business tax people....Yes, I'm THAT late getting my "I only made this much last year so I get a pass on paying any local biz tax" papers in.

I had it. Of course I had it. I HAD to have had it to file Fed & state taxes(done on time-really)....Just don't know where it got to. filing is not one of my good things.

Re-read Madeline L'Engle's THE WIND IN THE DOOR. Fine Good vs Evil, do what you gotta do, "there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in all your philosophies, Horatio" kinda thing. Yeah, I know it's a "Young Readers" book. Ya wanna make somthin' of it, pork pie?......Pork pie? Where the heck did THAT come from? "never mind"-done in classic Gilda Radner/Emily Lattella character voice.

This doing late tax papers thing must getting to me....no, honest, I'm not like this usually.....oh, ok, so maybe I am.

I've edited the blogs I read gadget to not include the title of most recent posts. It's somehow not keeping up with the timing of the actual new posts.

Check out the latest in my favorite group of entertaining, touching, mostly women bloggers - it's the Killing Flies with a Ukelale one from Queens land, Australia. While it's starting to snow on Beck(frog & toad-still friends) in Canada, they're hating "naughty geckos on my windows" there. good/entertaining stuff, i think.

Maybe I just like Australians...ever since those fine conversationalist/beer buying fellows I met back at Ned Kelley's Last Stand, across the street from the Pennensula Hotel, in Hong Kong, in 1976....'nother story.............

more later

another dad, another story

Reading Blogs about Moms & kids, and Dads and kids. Is it a meme, or just a universal theme? Different lives, in different locales, across the country, around the world(at least the English speaking/writing world - I remain, despite a couple semesters of college Spanish, woefully uni-lingual). What follows is just part of the continuing saga of one dad, one child.

My son, now four, and always small for his age, was recently seen by a very nice, very professional and yet warmly reassuring couple of child development people from the local school district. One a child psychologist, the other a speech pathologist.

After talking with my wife and I and our boy A. for a couple of hours the verdict was in: "Yes our child has speech/language development issues, as well as some social skills issues, that plainly and definitely qualify him the local early development special ed program". This came as a great relief to us. That may seem odd. We have known for some time that he has these issues. It took our state funded child medical providers a couple of years to come to the conclusion that, yes this child has some issues that need to be addressed.

What we somewhat knew, in the backs of our minds, but were less prepared to hear was that he shows a number of "red flag" traits our new specialists relate to high-functioning Autistic Spectrum Disorder.

Our son is very bright, but has problems knowing how to relate or deal with others in social groups. He absolutely will look you in the eye, and has a sense of humor, and initiates warm contact sort of stuff, and, and, and ...doesn't seem at all like what t.v. and movies portray as the severely affected Autistic stereotype.

But,....He does, sometimes, get kind of compulsive obsessive about stuff. He lines up toy cars by type and color. He freaks out if his banana or granola bar gets broken. he's a wizard a jig-saw puzzles, and builds fairly remarkable stuff out of Lego's and tinker toys, he sees spatial relationships and puts together things you never thought would go together in ways that make perfect sense when you see what he's done with them.....he...... he ........Lord...save my child. It will all be OK, but, you know, as a parent we tend to want our children to be all those things that we think will ensure and enable them to deal and survive and thrive out there in the "real" world as they grow up, and later after we're no longer able to shelter and take care of them. Hearing the A word in relation to one's small child is kind of like going to the doctor and hearing the C word. Ultimately deal able with (usually) but causing that momentary catch in the chest - the shift into crisis/survival/protection mode-which of course will give way to more reasonable, more calm well considered thought patterns, realizing it's not quite the end of the world we first felt down deep that it might be.

He is excited about going to school tomorow. The little yellow school bus will pick him up at the sitter's a couple of mornings a week, to a local elementary school, for his early special ed classes/sessions and drop him back off after. After this school year they will re-evaluate him to see where he's at then. Ginny has taken him to the school and introduced him to whoever was around, shown him the place and space, and generally let him getcomfortable with it. It will be OK.