Now that I’m back from my business trip, we’re getting into our summer schedule with the Monster.

Because we weren’t given ESY, we’ve arranged for some summer therapy to take the place of what the city should be offering.  Fortunately, my company gives us excellent insurance and it covers enough speech and OT that I don’t have to shell out much from my own pocket.  (That said, I’ll actually be hitting my out-of-pocket maximum this year anyway, much of that due to the birth of child #2… but it’s encouragement to see if another plan would suit us better.)  To ensure that he gets everything he needs and appropriate social interactions, this is going to entail a lot of running around.

Three mornings a week, he’ll be over at a summer program run by a local university.  This program concentrates on speech and language development – it’s obviously to help their students get experience as speech therapists, but I’m of the opinion that as long as they’re being supervised by someone who knows what they’re doing, I’m willing to let them learn with my kid.

The other two mornings, he’ll be at the JCC for summer camp with typically developing children (the wife keeps reminding me not to say ‘normal’) so he gets the benefit of socialization with other kids his own age, as well as pool time.  (The other benefit is that he’ll get swimming there one day a week, and he does so love the water.)

On top of that, the wife’s arranged for him to go for additional speech and OT therapy over at a local agency one afternoon a week, and a second afternoon per week will be spent at a special-needs gymnastics program.  The afternoons – Monday and Wednesday – somewhat void my offer to her to do all of the driving to and from the university program – it’s closer to my office than to the house – but at least I should be able to go with my original offer to drive the Monster to each of the programs to give her time to get the baby ready.

It feels like an awful lot of things for him to be doing over the summer.  I’m looking at it as a taste of normalcy – I already feel like my friends’ kids are over-programmed, and we’re getting a sense of what that’s like for a few weeks….