Well, that's a relief

I had a meeting with the school the other day regarding Finleigh. It was one of those regular meetings where you meet with all the people that work with Finleigh and discuss our goals and treatment. At the meeting was the special ed. director, her teacher (though not her aid), a physiotherapist, an occupational therapist and a speech therapist. The speech therapist, by the way, worked with Finleigh briefly when she was still tube feeding and did a speech assessment back then too. It was nice to have a familiar face who'd seen Finleigh before.

I was pretty nervous before the meeting because I was expecting a lot of comments about what we should be doing at home with her. Exercises we could be doing. Speech stuff. Reading. Etc, etc, etc. This has been how it's been in the past. The physiotherapist would give us stretches to do. The speech therapist would give us games to do, or little assignment, or words to focus on. We didn't see them enough to make much of a difference, so the majority of stuff had to happen at home. That's the way it went. I sometimes wondered why I even bothered taking her.

I'm happy to do stuff at home with her. I am. Hard as it is to give her a lot of individual attention, if there's a way to help her develop, I'm happy to do it. However, she's not usually happy to do it with me. It's rare that she'll even sit down and let me read her an entire book before she's pushing it away and rolling around on the floor. So doing new and challenging stuff? Forget it.

Thankfully, these very enthusiastic therapists were focused on what they can do at school to help her. At SCHOOL!!! Not at home. Of course they had a few suggestions to help with frustration levels and help with talking but, the aim was to work at stuff at school so that I can focus on being a mom at home.

What

a

re-

lief.

And thank you God.

You see, one of my final deciding factors for sending my baby to school was the way she reacted to me every time I tried to help her with her development. We were going nowhere. And so coupled with how well she's adjusting to school and the apparent enthusiasm and determination she's showing to the therapists and her teacher. This is so far feeling like a good decision. I'm not too proud to admit that I can't be everything to my children.

They feel like they can help her catch up.

They think she's got lots of potential.

Oh ya, and one of the goals is potty training. They're going to help me potty train!!!

So now, I can relax a bit and concentrate on loving her knowing that she's getting the help she needs.