![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Yesterday was a busy day. I'd taken the morning off to deal with it all, and that turned out to not be enough.
First on the agenda was getting Sophia into her new school uniform, and showing her the videos that her lovely new teacher had recorded for her to see - she'd made three short recordings (5 minutes each) of her reading stories. Two of them were about children starting school, and the third was "We're going on a bear hunt", which is the selected story for this year's transition to school.
We then delivered Gideon to nursery, and then walked Sophia the twelve minutes further on to her school.
We dropped in briefly to her wrap-around care* so that she could meet the people there and see how it was set up, before delivering her in to her new team who will be looking after her. It's a big class (the whole year, basically), with multiple teachers and assistants working across them all. A different way of working, but one that seems to fit in well with how Primary 1 works - everything is play, and they learn through that. So they're all doing fun things in their own self-organised groups, and then small sections of them are taken off to a corner to do a more focused activity for a bit.
After that, we headed home, and then went out again almost instantly to go get Gideon and take him across town to see a community paediatrician.
After Gideon's speech and language therapist had discharged him as (basically) a bit behind the curve but nothing to worry about, his nursery had wanted to have him checked out by the health visitors because they were concerned that he didn't communicate much, and didn't play with other children much.
A few weeks later, he'd had a minor transformation and happily plays with other children, chats in up to three word sentences, and is clearly on an upward curve. But by then the health visitors had passed an assessment to the psychiatrist, and he'd made an appointment to see Gideon.
So in we went, and had a frankly wonderful time. He was excellent with Gideon, Gideon responded really well to him (letting him check his pulse, tickle his stomach, chat to him, check his spine alignment, with no fussing at all), and he talked us through both Gideon's history and our parental ones (having two autistic parents is a major likelihood factor for developing autism). The end result was that he's not got enough information for Gideon to be definitively labelled as either autistic or with a delayed language disorder, it's probably narrowed down to one of those, and he'd like to see us again in 6 months to see how Gideon is getting on.
We then dropped Gideon off again, and I got home around 13:00. And with us having an appointment at the school to have an introductory chat with the teacher at 15:20, I realised that I wasn't going to get much work done that afternoon either, and let my boss know I was taking it off.
Which was lucky really, as my original plan (assuming I'd be back from the doctor by midday, and working to 5, with an hour's break for a quick chat with the teacher) was completely blown out of the water. We were the last appointments of the day, and they were running twenty minutes behind by the time we got there.
As we sat in the waiting room, Sophia wandered past us, going from the after-school area to the toilet, basically ignored us, and when I offered her the chance to come to the shops with me rather than being stuck in the after-school club said "Leave me here, I've made two friends." - which is exactly what you want to hear when you've been worried about her starting school, leaving most of her friends behind**.
And then the chat became fascinating and ran about twenty minutes *more* over. Which was nice, because the teacher was lovely. But eventually we let her go, did the shopping, collected Sophia, walked to the nursery, picked up Gideon, walked home, and fell over in a big heap.
(And then had to get back up, make dinner, eat dinner, play a game with Sophia, read her to sleep, put away a Sainsbury delivery that arrived when Sophia's eyes were just closing, empty and restack the dishwasher, tidy up the living room, hang up the clothes that I put on to wash this morning, and write this post. Which got Jane to proof-read before I posted it. This morning, after I got some sleep.)
*based at the school, and look after her before and after so that Jane and I can both work 9-5
**Of the 20-ish people in her nursery room who graduated this year 2 were going to the same school as her. And none of those were the ones she was closest to. And her bestest friend in the whole world moved to North Berwick, 20 miles down the coast.
First on the agenda was getting Sophia into her new school uniform, and showing her the videos that her lovely new teacher had recorded for her to see - she'd made three short recordings (5 minutes each) of her reading stories. Two of them were about children starting school, and the third was "We're going on a bear hunt", which is the selected story for this year's transition to school.
We then delivered Gideon to nursery, and then walked Sophia the twelve minutes further on to her school.
We dropped in briefly to her wrap-around care* so that she could meet the people there and see how it was set up, before delivering her in to her new team who will be looking after her. It's a big class (the whole year, basically), with multiple teachers and assistants working across them all. A different way of working, but one that seems to fit in well with how Primary 1 works - everything is play, and they learn through that. So they're all doing fun things in their own self-organised groups, and then small sections of them are taken off to a corner to do a more focused activity for a bit.
After that, we headed home, and then went out again almost instantly to go get Gideon and take him across town to see a community paediatrician.
After Gideon's speech and language therapist had discharged him as (basically) a bit behind the curve but nothing to worry about, his nursery had wanted to have him checked out by the health visitors because they were concerned that he didn't communicate much, and didn't play with other children much.
A few weeks later, he'd had a minor transformation and happily plays with other children, chats in up to three word sentences, and is clearly on an upward curve. But by then the health visitors had passed an assessment to the psychiatrist, and he'd made an appointment to see Gideon.
So in we went, and had a frankly wonderful time. He was excellent with Gideon, Gideon responded really well to him (letting him check his pulse, tickle his stomach, chat to him, check his spine alignment, with no fussing at all), and he talked us through both Gideon's history and our parental ones (having two autistic parents is a major likelihood factor for developing autism). The end result was that he's not got enough information for Gideon to be definitively labelled as either autistic or with a delayed language disorder, it's probably narrowed down to one of those, and he'd like to see us again in 6 months to see how Gideon is getting on.
We then dropped Gideon off again, and I got home around 13:00. And with us having an appointment at the school to have an introductory chat with the teacher at 15:20, I realised that I wasn't going to get much work done that afternoon either, and let my boss know I was taking it off.
Which was lucky really, as my original plan (assuming I'd be back from the doctor by midday, and working to 5, with an hour's break for a quick chat with the teacher) was completely blown out of the water. We were the last appointments of the day, and they were running twenty minutes behind by the time we got there.
As we sat in the waiting room, Sophia wandered past us, going from the after-school area to the toilet, basically ignored us, and when I offered her the chance to come to the shops with me rather than being stuck in the after-school club said "Leave me here, I've made two friends." - which is exactly what you want to hear when you've been worried about her starting school, leaving most of her friends behind**.
And then the chat became fascinating and ran about twenty minutes *more* over. Which was nice, because the teacher was lovely. But eventually we let her go, did the shopping, collected Sophia, walked to the nursery, picked up Gideon, walked home, and fell over in a big heap.
(And then had to get back up, make dinner, eat dinner, play a game with Sophia, read her to sleep, put away a Sainsbury delivery that arrived when Sophia's eyes were just closing, empty and restack the dishwasher, tidy up the living room, hang up the clothes that I put on to wash this morning, and write this post. Which got Jane to proof-read before I posted it. This morning, after I got some sleep.)
*based at the school, and look after her before and after so that Jane and I can both work 9-5
**Of the 20-ish people in her nursery room who graduated this year 2 were going to the same school as her. And none of those were the ones she was closest to. And her bestest friend in the whole world moved to North Berwick, 20 miles down the coast.
