Finding Your Talent

It’s the last week of the Monster’s day camps.  I’ve been running his morning carpools – it lets my wife tend to the baby without having to get everyone out the door first thing in the morning – even though the one camp that’s still running is decently out of my way.

When I dropped him off this morning and he dashed off, I called after him in Hebrew to ask him to come back to give me a hug and kiss before I went to the office.  He turned right where he was, came back, hugged and kissed me, and dashed off again to play with the magnets (one of his favorite things).   The teacher commented that she was very impressed, especially in light of everything, that he understands so many words in multiple languages. Continue reading

More Carrot Than Stick

Yes, another post about the potty.

For those who are following my tweet feed (@DadEnoughBlog), I was mentioning over the weekend that we managed to get the Monster to use the toilet a few times.  We’re up to thrice this weekend, including one where we think he indicated that he had to go and another where he clearly asked to go. Continue reading

Summer Daze

Next week’s the last week of summer camp for the Monster – then two weeks of ‘nothing’ before he starts his first year of public school.

We made the decision last week to not expand his ‘normal’ day camp from two days per week to five for the remaining weeks of the summer – it didn’t seem cost-effective for the six additional days of camp.  Instead, the wife’s suggested the idea of putting him into swim classes for the remaining weeks, since the JCC offers small-group instruction five days a week for the two remaining weeks. Continue reading

Building on Sand

So we’re into the four weeks before school where everything’s going to keep changing for the Monster.

I suppose my biggest concern coming into the summer was going to be the fact that his schedule wasn’t going to be a constant.  Consistency is important when it comes to his schedule, and we’re just not able to give him that this year, with the programs all having different start and end dates. Continue reading

You’ve Got To Fight For Your Right To Party

I’m going to step back into this.

On Friday, the New York Times posted an article in its Parenting section on including children with special needs in birthday parties.  (You can find the article here.)  I think that readers of this blog can already guess that I’m not the type to have kept my opinion to myself. Continue reading

Halfway to Fall

Today was the last day of one of the Monster’s day camps.

We were fortunate to find out about a speech and language camp run by a local university, and had the Monster there three days a week in a program that gives him at least some social exposure to other children as well as therapy sessions that our insurance will cover.  Unfortunately, because it is staffed by students from that same university, it’s not a whole-summer program – it ran only six weeks, and ended today, four weeks shy of the start of school. Continue reading

Speak Up!

When we went in for the IEP in April, we asked the city to provide ESY services for speech therapy, at the very least.  Because their speech therapist hadn’t sent a new report that proved her concern that there’d be some regression (she only sent a letter stating in three paragraphs that she was concerned at the possibility, without evidence), the city denied the request.

Now, it’s not like he’s not had speech therapy over the summer.  My insurance is covering a session a week at the Hearing and Speech Agency (HASA), and he’s attending a special day-camp three mornings a week that provides more speech therapy. Continue reading