We spent years chasing zebras. Are you familiar with the expression? If you hear a horse, you should look for a horse—not a zebra. Don’t start with the exotic. Eventually, you rule out all of the horses and you have to start looking for something a little less common. Looking back at all of the …
Read more
It’s here. The big day. All the planning and preparing is down to this. We’re back to school. I won’t really know if everything we did made enough difference until the end of the week (probably)*. Here’s to hoping. I had mixed feelings about the whole thing. Part of me is ready for the structure …
Read more
This is one of the biggest steps in preparing to go back to school. It’s something that I agonize over when it begins to consume my mind weeks before it actually happens. It’s time to meet the teacher. Last year the bar was raised to the moon. Realistically, I know that we will never have …
Read more
I didn’t post last week because we were on vacation—Sorry, not sorry! I have decided to turn my back to school posts into a little bit of a series though, so I am hoping to post twice this week. My last post was about easing out of summer and into a routine. Going on vacation …
Read more
Summer is never quite what I expect. It used to be relaxed and breezy—a chance to go to the pool everyday and do strange science experiments with the boys. They’ve outgrown the science experiments and our lives have gotten too hectic. When the boys were younger, not much changed from season to season (including the …
Read more
This year has been the year of changes. I largely attribute that to an amazing teacher, an amazing special ed teacher, and an amazing class. The perfect storm of opportunity for him to begin to find his place in this world. People are noticing. My mom comments on it all the time. He is at …
Read more
The thing with Yoshi is that he hears everything, even when you think that he is not listening. It gets more interesting because he doesn’t forget anything. You would think that after ten years I would be more aware of these things. By now I should have learned to watch what I say, even if …
Read more
When Yoshi was a bitty baby, everyone agreed that he was allergic to everything. It was easy. (Ha! Believe me.) As he got older the doctors stopped agreeing on anything and everything was difficult. The battles between the who, what, where, and why are for another day. Eventually, we ended up at Johns Hopkins University Hospital …
Read more
I know this is a hot button topic for a lot of people. Usually our story doesn’t look like most of the others you hear or read about. We’ve had a pretty good experience overall with the special ed process. Except for one part—occupational therapy. Yoshi went into school with an educational diagnosis of autism …
Read more
We have all been there. Over committed. It could be self-imposed—we said yes too many times, or it could be circumstances out of our control—when it rains, it pours, after all. Or, worst case scenario, it could be a terrible combination of both. That’s where I found myself last week. It’s where I’ve been living …
Read more