Shopping With Primo [Or: When Your Early Reader Can Kind Of Be a Pain In the Ass]

[Buying cereal at our local Trader Joe’s.]

Keen: Vamos a comprar Cheerios.

Primo: [Whiny] No son Cheerios!

Keen: No, no son Cheerios. Son Joe’s O’s.

Primo: [WHINY AND SCREECHY] No son Joe’s O’s! Son TRADER JOE'S HIGH FIBER ORGANIC O'S!!!

Keen: Sigh.

[The Cheerios bars made from said Trader Joe's High Fiber Organic O's were delicious. I think I liked them more than the boys did.]

Dandelions

The boys' nanny quit unexpectedly a couple of months ago. While it definitely shook things up around here, I'm lucky that a) I'm a freelancer and b) It was a slow month and I had no work lined up when she quit, so I was able to take a month off. And that month was idyllic. I got to spend an entire month with my boys, and I loved it.

What will always stand out when I think of this spring is the dandelions in the huge field Primo and I walk by as we're walking home from school. He insists on picking them, and he refuses to blow on them himself but instead hands them to me. And every time, I am reminded of one of my very favorite poems ever, "La florecita de diente de león" by the Costa Rican writer Carmen Lyra:

Soy la florecita
del diente de león,
parezco en la hierba
un pequeño sol

Me estoy marchitando,
ya me marchité;
me estoy deshojando,
ya me deshojé.

Ahora soy un globo
fino y delicado,
ahora soy de encaje,
de encaje plateado.

Somos las semillas
del diente de león,
unas arañitas
de raro primor.

¡Qué unidas nos puso
la mano de Dios!
Ahora viene el viento:
¡Hermanos, adiós!

This Post Is Brought to You by the Letters S and E

If you start typing letters in the search window in the upper right-hand corner of my browser, Google will helpfully suggest search phrases that begin with those letters for you.

If you type in the letters S and E, for example, one of the options is Sesame Street. Another is sexual intercourse.

If your computer-obsessed (and remarkably computer-literate) preschooler types in both of those letters for whatever reason, guess which option he will pick?

[Time for parental controls. I wouldn't have been so freaked out about it, except the kid can read and I didn't want him repeating that at preschool. Also, he'd clicked on the Google Images tab. I supervise him when he's on the computer, but he was fast.]

Excuses

So, all I have to say for myself is that IEP season kicked my ass but good.

I’m still sorting it out, and there will be details. And I know that blogging will probably make me feel good after I do it, kind of like exercise, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to sit down and do it. (Blog. Or exercise, either.)

I don’t want this blog to be All Autism, All the Time, but that’s kind of how things have felt around here lately, so instead I’m silent.

And yet—there’s been so much good stuff, too. The extra time I’ve been able to spend with my boys since our nanny quit. The fact that my mom is here to lend a hand, and she makes the best piña coladas on this planet. The unbelievable progress Secondo has made lately. Firing up the grill on cool evenings for no real reason and enjoying time on the patio with a nice glass of white wine. Work, even, because it’s always interesting.

I might have to ease back into things with some fluff. Jump-start the blog and see what happens.

Books

I am constantly on the lookout for children's books in Spanish. I find them in Costa Rica, on Amazon, on my online book-swapping site (I've had surprisingly good luck there), at library sales, at thrift stores and once, incredibly, at a yard sale. I often--though not always--use money from my own budget in order to avoid financial ruin. We have quite a library built up, and I love seeing the boys get all excited when I come home and announce I've brought them a libro nuevo.

I found the Latin Baby Book Club last year and was thrilled to finally find a place that had useful, thoughtful recommendations for children's books in Spanish. I'll be writing monthly reviews there, and my first one is up here. The book is called Poemas con sol y son, and it's one of our favorite books of poetry to read together.

Just FYI, in case anyone is interested!

Thanks

Thanks you all--both my IRL friends and my friends in the computer--for your comments on my last post. (I left that support group meeting thinking, "Damn, I wish I could go have coffee with Kal and Christine.") I think people who blog regularly know this, but I hadn't quite realized just how much better I would feel once I posted about that meeting. Kal's comment provided some food for thought, too. This is Secondo's teacher's very first year teaching, so she's very enthusiastic and caring, and she is just so good with him. I don't even want to think about him moving up a class next year.

The flip side of the meeting was that it led to a discussion of IEPs that I found incredibly useful, especially since we will be redoing Secondo's next month. I need to walk into this one prepared.

My brain is mush right now, but I just wanted to say thanks.

Support

I occasionally attend a support group for parents of children with special needs. I was excited to find out about it, and even though it’s held on weekday mornings, my schedule sometimes allows it. I’ve met some very nice people, including the coordinator, a gentle soul I was drawn to the minute I met her, a woman who gives out her cell phone number so you can call her in the middle of the night about an IEP if you need to. They are a wealth of information and experience. Their kids are all older than mine. Many of their children have multiple disabilities and are autistic on top of that, a fact that humbles me. They treat me, the newcomer, with kid gloves. Your son was just diagnosed, they tell me. You’ll never be as vulnerable as you are right now. It will never be this hard again. It will still be hard, but it will be different.

And every time I go, I question whether or not I should go back.

The group is different every time, so we start with introductions. My son, Secondo, is three, I tell the group at the most recent meeting. He’s autistic, and he’s in the special-ed preschool class. His teacher is wonderful, and he’s made a lot of progress. She just told us we need to rewrite his IEP, because he’s mastered most of the goals in his current IEP.

I tell the group this, and it’s not like I’m expecting a fucking cookie, as my roommate used to say. But I am definitely not expecting the response I get, which is this:

Laughter. Followed by: “Well, enjoy it now, because that’s never going to happen again.” A couple of snorts. Taken aback, I look at the coordinator, who says, “You do know that this won’t happen again.” I don’t know if it’s a statement or a question. Her tone is gentle, her expression is compassionate, but she is speaking as if she needs to disabuse me, the Pollyanna in their midst, of the notion that my son’s progress in preschool means that life will be nothing but rainbows and fairy dust from now on.

“Oh, sure,” I laugh, because now I am on the spot, and I have to laugh it off. But I am hurt, really hurt. We move on to the next introduction.

The thing is, I know. No one has to tell me. I know things get hard, really hard. I know that parents hire advocates because they feel the system is failing their children and have knock-down, drag-out fights at IEP meetings. I think about junior high and about kids being cruel to my boy, and it terrifies me. I know Secondo will be autistic for the rest of his life, and I don't know what his future holds. I know that Secondo’s special-ed preschool class is a special little bubble, one in which in many ways, I don’t have to face reality. In this bubble I can concentrate on the good, and only on the good, if I so desire. I know. I know one of the reasons he’s mastered his goals is because they were so basic to begin with, and that things will become much more challenging. But I’d rather just be happy that he’s mastered these goals. Because if I really think hard about the fact that one of the original goals was to get him to respond to his name, it makes me want to cry.

But you know what? No matter how basic those goals were, I normally do find it easy to feel optimistic about things. Because the fact of the matter is, Secondo wasn’t responding to his name a few months ago. (Before he was evaluated, but after we’d shared our concerns with P’s parents, they came to visit and my father-in-law spent a great deal the visit yelling, “Secondo!!” and clapping his hands in Secondo’s face to get him to respond. I can’t even describe how stressed out I was, or the despair I felt right then.)

But he’s come a long, long way since then, and I’m prouder of him than I can say.

So, let me try my introduction again, here, on my blog. My son is three, his name is Secondo, and he’s autistic. He’s in a special-ed preschool class, and he’s doing great. His teacher suggested we rewrite his IEP soon, because he’s mastered most of his goals. They were basic goals, but they were things I couldn’t even imagine him doing only a few months ago.

Isn’t that awesome?

[And hey, if you want to leave a comment, at least you know what not to say.]