It’s been some time since I last updated my blog and a number of things have happened in our lives, both good and bad. I will concentrate on the good.
Over the past month, we have Avi has been approved for both speech and OT therapies in school which he was not getting before. The speech therapy will help Avi to learn to use words to explain himself rather than emotional outbursts which we should be a big help to him and to us. The OT therapy will help him with his writing as well as a host of other issues.
Avi will be attending sleep away camp this summer! We found a wonderful camp called Round Lake Camp. It is part of the New Jersey Y camp system and as such is kosher and shomer Shabbat to the point where they do not use electricity on Shabbat and they don’t have the kids write or do other things that would violate Shabbat. The camp is the only Jewish special needs camp focusing on children with ASD, ADHD, and other social issues. Avi is really looking forward to going. He will be going for the 2nd camp session this year, which is three weeks from July 29th through August 20th. The day after he gets home from camp, we will be going on our family vacation to New Hampshire! So it will be a busy summer.
The last updates talked about our having the IEP meeting for Avi. We got the IEP back and it was a mess. No goals and objectives and it had nothing about his therapies (to be fair the evals were not done yet, so I do not understand why they could not wait a week or so to write the new one). So now Marsha will have ANOTHER meeting with the school district to discuss what needs to change.
The two biggest changes (besides the therapies) in the IEP will be having Avi reclassified as autistic rather than emotionally disturbed. The ED classification is really a horrible label that can have a negative impact on a child for a very long time. The other change is that Avi was accepted to go to the Newmark School starting in September and it seems that Highland Park is not going to stand in the way of that.
So it has been a good month since I last wrote. We realize though, that with Avi is it always a two steps forward and one step back. I am hoping that we get in more than two forward before the step back this time.