Observations

I went to school with Micah yesterday. I decided to observe him and give pointers to his para (1:1 aide). I also observed the classes and the special ed teachers involved seemed quite interested in my input. There were some issues with one class, one of his mainstream classes, but I really don't want to get into that here. I'd probably walk away as angry as I was at the end of the school day yesterday, and I would much rather focus on the positive.

I began the day with Micah wanting to go to school earlier. It was strange for a kid to want to go to school and be there before it begins, but he wanted it, I wanted to see why and so we went. He went and stood outside and said "hi" to people. Not random people, he was selective. He wanted to talk with people he knew. Once people came that he knew, he said "hi" then some formed a group, he stood back a bit for a while looking at them, then he went over and smiled at them. He seemed to have no idea how to add to the conversation, but he hung out with them.

Nobody looked at him weird. Nobody made him feel unwelcome or strange. He just stood in the group and listened and smiled and he was just happy.

I thought this was a strange phenomenon, as he had never had this kind of experience with others before. Even the youth group at church said "hi" and never really tried to make him feel unwelcome, but he just sat and colored. At his old school kids mostly said "hi" and walked by. Striking up conversations was usually facilitated. These people weren't just tolerating him for the sake of a grade or something that they could put on their resume. They just treated him like the peer that he is and just let him be a friend.

That smile on his face during the interactions that I found were not isolated incidents but the norm for down time spent with peers including lunch time and time in the hallways between classes made me realize that my son is a person with autism, but also quite the extrovert.

This seems odd to me, but I couldn't figure out why. I mean, autism doesn't really change personality, it changes how it is expressed. I just never figured him for an extrovert. He usually ignores people. I found the difference, though. He doesn't ignore people who don't consider him odd. People who talk with him like anyone else are the people he is drawn to. Can you blame him? Nobody wants to be treated like the odd one out.

Micah went through his routine for the day, stopping in the hallways to talk to certain people, knowing that his aide doesn't let him talk to more than 2 people en route to his next class for expediency purposes. He chatted his routine small talk, never really going farther than his rote conversation that is just "Hi! How are you?" One day I hope he will be able to go past that, but at the moment it is working for him. He sat with cheerleaders and football players at lunch, which make up the majority of his circle of friends. His aide told me that her son is on the football team so most of those kids know her, so she just made talking to Micah normal with them by just saying at the beginning of the year, "It's no big deal, he just wants to be friends." The kids just ran with it.

Now some people will talk to Micah and allow him to sit with them but really just look at him sideways and tolerate him. This really isn't the case. Micah picks up that kind of body language. It happened at his last school. These kids just treat him as the silent guy in the group and accept him. They know he doesn't like to be touched beyond a fist bump, so they give him his fist bumps and just include him. They also know that he doesn't like foul language so their conversations tend to be clean. It's the funniest thing when Micah tells a huge football player "Hey, use nice words!" and they apologize.

My boy cracks me up. He's such a good guy. No wonder people want to hang out with him.

A Different Life

It has been a while since I blogged. At that time we were applying for a house that we didn't get.

Since then I have taken the kids and my mom and grandmother on a cross country road trip, moved to a new house (a different one than the previously blogged about one, but enormous and gorgeous), changed my kids to new schools, and have struggled with all of the new.

I can't fit all of that in one blog. Well, I could, but it would take a while. Instead, I think I will probably skip all of the changes and just write about life now. 

Don't worry folks who want to know about the road trip, I will share about that later.

At the beginning of the year, I talked about the year of rest.

HA!

Okay, so life kinda went crazy on me. Still, I believe that the message of rest has still been extremely important to me this year. In the midst of the chaos and stuff I just can't control but still manage to worry about, I still found myself really focusing on rest. It's why I could actually go on my vacation knowing that I didn't actually finish all of the packing that I was supposed to, knowing that my new house was going to be ready while I was gone and Tony was going to have to move, ask people for help (which is totally outside of his MO), and just trust that he had it handled because I just wasn't going to lose my deposits or the full payments for the things that I had planned for that month. It's why I could handle when we moved and were going back to a new home and I had to trust that Tony was going to enroll our kids in school so that they could start in the weeks that followed our return.

After the trip, I came home to a new house and a ton of boxes. It was a long trip and pretty hard, but still restful. I no longer had a job besides staying home and caring for my grandmother, who during the trip learned that she could do more than she was doing before the trip, but still needed 24/7 care. I managed to work hard and get the boxes out of my kitchen, then the living room, then the dining room. Then we took the boxes out of the girl's room because they wouldn't unpack for themselves more than the few things they took out of the boxes when we first go there so I decided that they just didn't need that stuff. It's in the garage and I'm still in the midst of considering what is the best way to just get rid of it.  Micah's stuff went into his closet and his room is the cleanest of all of us. 

I set up a new chore chart for a new house. We had rooms we had never had before and I wanted everything to just stay clean all the time. I changed from a weekly chore system to a daily chore system, started filling in holes in cleaning with chore sticks for when people do things that are not okay, and my house stays pretty clean all the time. I really felt like I accomplished something with that one. I never felt like that in the ten years of being in the old house. Same kids, mostly the same system, but the new house set up a new feeling of clean. Everyone actually feels like we have a clean house when we are done. 

Hooray! I accomplished something!

School was and still is a bit more difficult. The twins are fine. Bored, actually. Still, they are working and feeling like they are actually smart kids. It's because they are and their school is a bit behind their last school, but their self esteem is significantly higher which is helping them achieve more. Ali came home many times last year frustrated that she "isn't a math person" which is an absurd notion put into her head by well-meaning folks who just wanted to make her feel better about her 3 (the grades are 1-4 there) in math. Her 3 was ridiculously close to a 4, which is a 90% or higher, but the idea that "some people are just not math people" was put in her head anyway, and her grades slowly declined because she had it in her head that she didn't understand.

Now Ali is in a class that is still doing grade level work, they reviewed stuff from last year at the beginning of the year like teachers normally do, and suddenly everything clicked in her head. She has 100% in math this year. An "A" in this school district. She has a wonderful teacher who loves to listen to her stories that are relevant to the conversations about the history and books that they are studying. She is not teased here in the same way that she was in her last school, though she is still having trouble making friends. She has trouble when people are not listening to her even though she is right, and that is not helping her. I'm good with her staying right, but she has to learn to do it without screaming at people that they should listen to her because she knows the right answer. 

Zoe has fewer issues, but she's a little more ahead of her sister in interpersonal communication. Still no trouble in school. Straight A's, but she didn't have the trouble that Ali had at the last school. She didn't have kids teasing her all the time, so she had an easier time of it there. 

Becca is a whole different ball game. She was used to higher standards. She had teachers who took GATE seriously and did quite a bit of project based learning and encouraged her in many different ways. Her new school's only class that is considered "advanced" is Algebra I for 8th graders. I went to her open house and the science teacher went over the different things that they were going to be doing that year, projects that would be really fun, but Becca sat next to me and said, "I did that last year" over and over. There wasn't a single project that had not been covered last year in either her science class or her MESA Math class. It's been difficult keeping her motivated. Her English class is the worst. Writing assignments are few and far between. I think there has only been 2 this year. The teacher assigns AR tests to keep track of the student's reading (multiple choice, 10 question tests about each book...it's stupid). There is no room for creative expression in his class. His quizzes and tests are vocabulary and spelling. When I had a parent teacher conference and told him, in the nicest way possible that my daughter was bored, he said that she should be getting and A then, but I found that the only reason why she wasn't was because she stopped turning stuff in. She would do his assignments and they would sit in her backpack. She turned them all in, decided to actually try getting on a computer to take AR tests so she could get scores for those grades, and everything that she has turned in was perfect. She's still bored, but at least she will get a good grade. I gave her a journal for her to write and draw in so she had an outlet. Every bad grade that she has can be attributed to boredom. I told her that it is just one year. High school will have clubs and sports that she can join (there is nothing like that at this school) and she will no longer be bored.

Micah's school is very different as well. He had great grades last year. This year is getting rough. It started with his Engineering class. He did amazing at his last school in engineering. His teacher recognized his innovative mind and gave him the tools to let him run with it while teaching him engineering concepts along the way. Don't get me wrong, the first few months of that class were horrible until the teacher realized how to communicate with Micah and how to get him to express himself in ways that everyone else could understand. By the end, Micah had the highest grade in the difficult class because he was trying and loved it. 

This school has a very different focus for engineering. Now, engineering is a very broad field of study. There are core concepts, but engineers are diverse in application. The old school and the old teacher recognized this, asked the kids about the fields that they were interested in within engineering and allowed for expression and would explain why the core concepts  were important for those fields. When it came to projects, he encouraged expression in the fields of interest within the bounds of the actual assignment. He was growing engineers.

The new school has a different approach. First of all, I have to note that this is a brand new, first year teacher for engineering. He has a plan and really has a hard time with the idea of adapting that plan. He explained to me that he was hired to really help out the robotics team. Micah is in the second level of engineering and they are still learning core concepts, but the application is all within the field of robotics. Micah doesn't like robotics. On top of that, every project in the class is within a group. Group dynamics is not a strength of anyone on the autism spectrum. I should also point out that engineers are not exactly known for their desire to do "group work." This teacher is not growing and equipping these kids for life, he's trying to recruit a robotics team. 

So, as a mom seeing all of this and watching my son fail the class because it isn't the engineering that he was sold on last year, I ask my intelligent son, "Do you want to change your schedule and get out of that class?" Not that I want my kid to have to be successful in everything. I don't care about his GPA because he is planning on attending a 2 year college and just get some certifications for what he wants to do anyway. I just don't want him so frustrated and stretched beyond his limits that he starts to melt down constantly.  

My boy said that he wanted to stick with engineering.

I have to respect his decision even though it's kind of killing me right now. I'm also in the process of waiting for improvement because the teacher seems to be ignoring the adaptations that are very specifically lined out in his IEP. His attitude is that he just doesn't want Micah in his class and at this point Micah knows it and is acting out because of it. It's really making me mad.

I want to step in and scream at people, but the reality is that they just don't know my kid. I quietly send emails and save all of the communication. I gather data and at times, with as little hostility as I can manage quote laws that they are violating. I am working with his case manager who now meets with the engineering teacher to discuss compliance with the IEP.

The grades are not improving. The grades make it look like modifications are not actually being used. I am shadowing him tomorrow. If that does not go well, I am calling an IEP. I will probably call one either way. 

I hate this stuff.

Rest. 

My rest in the middle of this is daily. I am making it a point to actually read something each day. This could mean a million different things, but the rule is that the topic cannot be on the struggle of the day. I can read stuff to help me in the struggle, but it doesn't count as rest.

I'm consuming all kinds of information about rest and slowing down. It has been great.

I'm still having MS issues. I think those issues have more to do with the heat because I moved to the middle of the freaking desert than with stress, though. 

Oh, one more change is coming. I'm very excited about it. My mother is retiring. She is retiring next month. Just a few short weeks and my grandmother, who is not real fond of me anymore, will have someone else to complain to. YAY!

Okay, my mom will be a lot happier too, which means my house will be happier. She has lived tired for far too long, working all day then coming home to care for my grandmother. She gets time off when I can work that out, but it is really hard for me to help her out with that since I have 4 kids and a husband to care for as well. It will be nice to see the division of labor changed so that I can break her when she needs it instead of me breaking her so she can go to work. 

I will also have the break from the house I need as well when I go back to work. I have applied to substitute teach again, but no response. I am probably going to go for some seasonal work for a while when my mom actually retires so I can bring in some money until I figure out what else I want to try. I just don't know yet, but I'm excited to try.

This will not replace my rest. I'm determined that the changes in my life will not take away from my rest. I need it for sanity. The boxes that are still all over my bedroom and filling my garage will not keep me from rest, either. Everything will have it's place eventually...or it will sit there until we move again. I have decided that I will get work done on my timetable and nobody else's. It's not procrastinating if I'm working without a deadline, right? ;-)