goodfountain

Tomorrow morning I meet with Chee’s team at school for a conference. It’s not the annual IEP meeting, that won’t be until December, this is a quarterly progress report.

I know Chee is doing awesome. The language development, the sensory modulation, the improved fine and gross motor skills that I see daily evidence of is reassuring (and incredible too). There is no doubt that she is progressing. I can give countless examples of conversations we have, new experiences that she handles beautifully, and successful activities that demonstrate her vastly-improved fine and gross motor skills. And let’s not forget that not-so-insignificant achievement of potty training.

(In searching for posts where I’ve recounted her language development, I can’t find any. Oh my. I have much to share. The girl amazes us every day! At the end of this I’ll share a couple of gems.)

Why do I feel anxious? Because I want her teacher and therapists to see what I see, yet I fear they don’t. Perhaps they are conditioned to focus on the deficits. After all, that kinda IS their job - to identify and support her where she needs help. Perhaps Chee doesn’t show off her true self at school the way she does at home. That can probably be said of many a child.

A note came home today with one positive sentence and three areas of concern. The positive sentence is that she continues to make progress. The areas of concern are her echolalic speech patterns, her lack of interaction with her peers, and her episodes of anxious behavior.

When we start the meeting, I think I’ll ask for them to please share with me the examples of progress they’ve seen. If the meeting starts with a litany of concerns about Chee, I will probably get very depressed. In the interest of positive mood preservation, we must start (and end) with the positive.

As for the areas of concern, I still see progress there. She is less echolalic than she was when she started preschool six months ago, although she is definitely still echolalic. As for peer interaction - it’s obvious she desperately wants to play with her peers and interact with them. Just this week the speech therapist from school shared a positive story of how she maintained appropriate peer interaction with another child without adult support. As for the episodes of anxious behavior, well, I don’t see that, so I’m relying on them to give me examples. I don’t see her being anxious at home or anywhere else we go. Unless I don’t know what anxiety looks like.

I knew that as this meeting approached I’d start to be sick with worry. Worry that all the progress I’m seeing isn’t real, it’s just imagined, that my Chee is simply not measuring up. I find myself tempering my enthusiasm about her development with a guarded so-called realism that says, Don’t get too confident, she’s still behind… If I could insert an eye-rolling emoticon here, I would. Why should I be guarded? I’m her mother, for Pete’s sake, there should be no one more enthusiastic than me. The truth is that I don’t want to go into school tomorrow and have my hopes dashed.

Into self-lecture mode I go now. Development is not a race. And if it were a race, it would be a marathon and not a sprint. The 10 hours a week they spend with Chee provides only a snapshot of who she is and how she’s developing. Ultimately Mama knows best. And no matter what they tell me tomorrow, it won’t change the truth of all the development that I have seen.

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Language Development

Here are just a couple of examples of great language development that we are seeing with Chee. First, she speaks in first person the majority of the time now. She came home with a lovely water color of a daffodil she had painted and I asked her, What is this? and she immediately responded, I painted that. It’s a daffodil. Last time she came with a painting and I asked her what it is, I received only a one-word response. Daffodil. (I guess she likes to paint daffodils.)

Today I asked her if she used the potty at school and she said, No, I went at home. True, she had just used the potty here at home.

And it’s not just the first-person language I’m hearing. She’s telling stories about her day. She asking questions of us. She’s talking back to the television, Oh no, (Curious) George, be careful! It’s all beautiful.

One of my favorites happened yesterday. One of Chee’s favorite things to do is look for cards I hide around the house with instructions on where to find the next card. We did that yesterday and she just loves it. Then I thought to try a Scavenger Hunt so I made a list of items for her to find around the house. I handed it to her and she read it and then said, Mommy, it’s not a place. Smart girl - she was expecting more directions, and she communicated appropriately.

Typing all this does something for me. It helps ease the anxiety. No matter how the conference goes tomorrow, no matter what their perception of Chee is, it doesn’t change anything. Chee is Chee. And she’s doing better than awesome. I couldn’t be happier. And neither could she.