So Long Infants & Toddlers.....

We had J's initial IEP meeting yesterday. With a dozen or so signatures, give or take a few, I officially ended our time with Infants & Toddlers (as of his birthday).  Bittersweet, for sure. The last two years have been quite the ride that has taught us so much and brought some wonderful people into our lives.

This was not my first time around the block with a team since all three kids have them. But it was kind of a particularly nerve-wracking one for me, more so than I thought it would be, because it was building the framework for all services going forward into kindergarten.

The more I thought about it later, I realized I was also on edge because this was my chance to make sure J didn't fall through the cracks in the same way his brothers did until we caught on to the fact that our concerns were actually legit and we could ask for things from the school system.  This was our chance to really get it right from the very beginning.

It went well. We mostly got everything we wanted. He gets to stay with his county playgroup all next school year, which will focus on the pragmatic speech weaknesses and appropriate play and social skills.  He also gets visits at his regular preschool from his Play N Learn teacher, which is fabulous. It wasn't supposed to be her as our preschool is not one of the ones in her territory, but we asked if it was possible. Thankfully, she also thought it was important for consistency, so pushed it through. THRILLED about that.

The only thing we didn't get, which I may revisit in the near future, is OT services. They gave us monitoring. OT monitoring is kind of joke. That was what S got in kindergarten when I kept saying, "Something is wrong. He CAN'T write letters." Monitoring resulted in the OT popping her head in every so often. looking over his shoulder and saying, "Yeah. Hrm. Let's just wait and see."  Of course, we lost an entire year and played catchup last year after his diagnosis.

After that, "wait and see"does not fly with me anymore.  You know what "wait and see" means? It means they have a busy schedule with other kids whose problems seem more immediate or whose parents are squeakier wheels.

Yeah. NO.  In fairness, they did agree to up the monitoring frequency. So that's something.

The team tried to tell me that I can't expect a child of J's age, gender, activity level, and likely future ADHD diagnosis to sit down and try to imitate letters or draw a line or a circle. That I should just take him to playgrounds and Little Gym instead.

Yes. Thanks. I get this. Play is the thing for this age. And we do TONS of this. But I want that OT stuff in place for when it IS age appropriate for him to sit down and learn to write and ends up struggling with it. It's possible he won't.... but some of the testing points to the likelihood that he will.  And I am NOT letting him lose an entire year like his brother did just because OT's schedule is too full.

Anyway, so I'll be bringing that back up again in future months.....

I also asked for speech, knowing we probably wouldn't get it. The speech help he needs is all conversational, which is what the regular teacher works on at group and when she visits preschool. It was one of those "let's just ask and see what happens" things. They shot that down pretty quickly.

Those people are really good and well-practiced at shooting you down. :\

All in all though, a successful meeting. Glad to have it out of the way! From here on out, we deal with our home school, which is all the familiar people we have teams with for the other two boys.  They know us well. I am so THRILLED about this. :)  Should make things much easier and less nerve-wracking going forward.