practicing his words

I took Danny to the elementary school yesterday morning for his speech evaluation. He was very excited to finally go inside. We drive past his school almost every day but he's never been in. I've been doing my best to get him excited to start kindergarten (although he's been ready since fall of 2010 when Kris started kindergarten so it's not too hard). Looks like my hard work and enthusiastic pointing to the school on the drive-by's has paid off because he was thrilled to be there. Yea for small victories.

I was worried he'd pull out his grumpy and I don't want to do anything you tell me to do card for this appointment. He can be like that sometimes (ahem, a lot of the time). He was wonderful. I've been prepping him for today for a week though so I'll go ahead and take all the credit.

I'd tell him he was going to practice his words with a teacher INSIDE the school. He'd get to show her all the cool words he can say while he is INSIDE the school. Show her how smart he is INSIDE the school. See how I did that? Focus on the prize.

We were early. The lady in the office escorted us to the speech lady's room. She wasn't quite ready for us so she asked us to just wait in the hall for a minute. Danny looked down the long hall and told me he was just going to walk down and then come back...for exercise. Ha!

I told him that was ok but he had to walk and be very quiet because kids were learning and they have to be able to listen to their teachers. Oh, I just wish I'd made a little video of his exercise walk. He strutted down that hallway, pausing to look into each open classroom door. When he got to the end, he turned around, waved at me and then began the walk back, with all the same pausing and peering into classrooms. It was too cute.

The speech lady came out of her room. She called him Daniel and I told her we just call him Danny. We went into another room for the testing. She was nice but he acted shy at first. He kept whispering his answers to her questions (stuff like what do you want santa to bring you? how many brothers and sisters do you have? do you like legos?) into my ear. I told him he'd have to talk out loud to her so she could hear all the words he knows.

He warmed up to her pretty quickly. She did the testing (which was a bunch of pointing to pictures and asking him to tell her what he saw). He got to pick a treat when it was over (he chose bubble gum). I go back in a week to review the results with her and see if he qualifies for services. I'm ok if he does. I'm also ok if he doesn't. I just wanted to feel like I made an effort to get him help if he can have it. If it's stuff he'll just grow out of, I'll take that too.

I did get a pretty cool souvenir though.



As a former special ed teacher I've given out hundreds (maybe? who knows? it sure felt like hundreds) of these to parents. Now I have one. It feels weird to be on the other side.

Before we left, we wandered around the halls (with permission from the office ladies of course) and checked out the school. He was so excited to see what was down each hallway. We even stopped by to see my friend who teaches there. I'm not going to lie. It made me miss having a classroom of my own. Like, a lot. Seeing all those bulletin boards and kids and desks and whiteboards brought tears to my eyes (they didn't spill over or anything...no crying at school). I miss it.

After all that morning fun stuff we picked up Cate from Aunt Judy's house, met up with a friend at Chick-fil-A (where Cate was freaked out by the person walking around in a cow costume giving high 5's to little kids), went to Walmart for a few things (including chocolate donut holes with sprinkles), came home and tidied up because the young women from church were coming over to work on party prep stuff.

I think we're prepped. Look what we did.



Cate was quite distraught that she couldn't have a tea party.

I think that's a nice looking stack of fake presents.

I'm just wondering what I'm going to do with all of those fake presents on Friday night when the church party is over and done with.

Suggestions?