Thanks to Cheryl Crow for today’s title (which is of course, close to my Beatles blog title!) Friday was the last day of the ESY program at Avi’s school. As part of Avi’s IEP he is to get what is called Extended School Year. In theory this is to keep Avi in the proper environment all year long. What it means in reality (and the minimum mandated by law) that Avi gets to continue at his school through the end of July. In past years we have tried Avi at different summer programs with some successes and many failures. This year, we decided to keep him at his school program and it clearly was the right idea. He did very well at Newmark for July, earning close to the max points most days and at the end of the summer her was able to purchase from the school store a set of walkie talkies that he had been wanting.
We are going away on a family vacation for the fourth week of August, so that leaves us with three weeks where we need to occupy his time. When he saw the brochure for Noam’s camp, he was very jealous. So I called the camp director and we worked out a way for Avi to attend for the three weeks. He would have a shadow that we would pay to be with him at all times at the camp. In the weeks leading up to camp, Avi discussed this with his therapist a number of times, and they worked out some guidelines for Avi (respect the camp and the counselors, leave others alone if you are angry and he can go to a specific place as a “safe spot” if he is getting too frustrated). Everything was sounding great and Avi was really looking forward to going.
Well, “mann tracht, gott lacht” as the Yiddish saying goes (man plans, God laughs). Avi gave a real fight when he was getting on the bus this morning because he was unable to sit in the seat he wanted. We had gone over this with him and told him that he might not get to sit exactly where he wants, but he blew up an ran home. Marsha went home to get him and after a while Avi said he was ready to get on the bus and knowing that they could get to another stop she drove him and he got on there. We soon heard that he was fighting on the bus and caused the bus to stop twice but they got to camp. He was spoken to and everything was ok for the moment. He was fighting again later (not sure about the details yet) and Marsha is going to go pick him up at 3:30 this afternoon at the camp (camp ends at 4 so they are still trying to make it work).
I don’t know if this is it for him at camp, or if we are going to try again tomorrow. We knew it would be a day to day trial, but I had hoped it would go a little further. If he follows the three guidelines, he will earn points (our old Avi Dollars!) and with them he can get the pokemon cards he really wants. For his this is a big incentive, so I am hoping that this was just a first day thing and he can go tomorrow without problems. During the last week of camp the camp is going to Six Flags Great Adventure, and I know he really wants to go, so hopefully with these incentives, he will calm down and we will be able to get this to work. If not, it’s going to be a long three weeks.