One! One Wonderful Blessing! Muah-ha-ha!

Good grief. According to my hit-count stats, someone actually came and visited Elvis Sightings via a Google search on "horrid kindergarten transition stories"!

It's probably just as well that I held off on posting during the long weekend. I wasn't very good company -- I'm glad that we're on to the second week of school here.

Day Two of school, Thursday, got off to a better start for Joy. We avoided the noisy playground and the teacher had altered the routine such that snacks were not out on the tables. I learned later that Joy had actually managed to hang with the class for the gathering time, and got to use her GoTalk for sharing time and to indicate that she'd brought a bag lunch. But then she started getting warm and lethargic -- I got a call late in the morning that she was running a low-grade fever. I requested that they feed her lunch and call me if things got worse, and didn't receive a second call, but only because she'd crashed out at naptime and they didn't really get her up until time to go home, because it was a shortened day. Her fever at that point had climbed to 101.

Day Three, Friday, I stayed home with her. The lethargy had passed, the cranky took its place. We had varying levels of cranky all weekend long, with lots of swipes and bangs and hair-pulls (particularly on Rose, poor kiddo). Not a good weekend for me either, especially compared to how energized and excited I was at the beginning of the semester last year.

Today was better. And I think it's time for a blessing count.

1) Joy made it through a full day today, no calls to work. She even made it to music class with her classmates, and hung with it much longer than I'd have expected.

ONE! ONE WONDERFUL BLESSING!
MUA-ha-ha-ha!

2) When I went to pick her up, she wrapped me in a huge hug while her aide filled me in.

TWO! TWO WONDERFUL BLESSINGS!
MUA-ha-ha-ha!

3) We invited friends we ran into on the schoolyard for an afternoon playdate. Joy was laid-back, happy, giggled when playdate-dude came popping out to say "peek" at her (rather than yowling and swatting at him)!

(OK, you can fill in the count in your own mind from here.)

4) I'm so fortunate that I got to experience an ideal kindergarten transition, three years ago with Rose. Rose was so ready for kindie when her turn came. Huge grins in her first-day photos, no tears either from her or from me. Pretty much as smooth as it gets.

5) I managed a bike-commute home this afternoon in the face of wind-advisory-level winds. I am bike-commuter, hear me roar! Plus I realized that coming home at 2:30, I'll not have to worry about the encroaching darkness that traditionally has made me put my bike away for the season when we "fall back" for Daylight Savings. I can actually wait for the snow to fly!

6) Zucchini flowers. Which turn into zucchinis. Which turn into zucchini bread with mini-chocolate chips. Yum. (Can you spot the actual zucchini in the photo?)

SIX! SIX WONDERFUL BLESSINGS!
MUA-ha-ha-ha!

There Was A Little Girl

The other night, JoyDad and I got to spend some quality time with Joy. Rose was off with friends for the whole evening, and Joy was delightfully happy, and playful, and interactive. At one point JoyDad sighed and turned to me and said, "When she's being sweet, she's just so sweet!"

Which was funny, because I'd already been plotting a post around a rhyme I'd remembered from my childhood:

There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Masterful use of slant-rhyme (forehead/horrid) -- I guess it makes sense that it comes from a master, though I hadn't known it was Longfellow's work until I went looking it up for this post!

Not that the concept of being good doesn't set my teeth on edge. Sweet behavior and core "goodness" are very different things, and we conflate them at our peril. It's even worse to assign good and horrid intention to a child whose behavior is surely coming from causes we don't fully understand...

I gotta say, though, Longfellow's little ditty captures something of the contrasts we've been living with Joy lately.

When we're having our good moments, she lets us record her singing, and then sings along again and again as we play it back! She smiles, she giggles, she initiates interactions, she's truly a joy to be with.

The bad moments lately, as I mentioned in my transition post, are rather scary things to have happening as we head toward kindergarten: head-banging, and hitting and hair-pulling.

Take Saturday, for example. Saturday afternoon Joy got up happy from her rest, and we went to a gallery opening. (Elites that we are.) Actually, it was a home-grown art show, engineered by an enterprising mama who'd been doing a home-based art camp for her daughters and then displayed the results on the walls of their home and made an event of it. The girls are in the same grades as Rose & Joy; the older one is on Rose's soccer team, and the younger will be in Joy's kindergarten class. So far, Joy is the only classmate that younger-daughter knows, and the family has been capitalizing on the fact that there'll be at least one familiar face!

Joy was willing to let me lead her around as her classmate-to-be proudly showed off work. Then we found some Joy-appropriate toys in the play room where she happily settled, despite rather a crunch of other kids romping and making noise. She loved the snacks: crackers! blueberries! grape tomatoes! We ended up staying for almost two hours, with nary an outburst or protest in sight. (OK, she did make one break out of the yard to try & play with a sprinkler on the other side of the cul-de-sac. But other than that.)

This was a different girl entirely from the one her morning autism-therapist encountered. Joy gave him one of the roughest sessions she's ever thrown at him -- he's usually a favorite for her. He could hardly make the slightest request of her without getting an over-the-top frustration reaction. Several of these involved Joy getting down on her hands and knees and trying to pile-driver her head into the floor.

The head-banging. Oh my, the head-banging.

We have a whole bag of calming tricks, which we shared at a meeting with her school team yesterday. These include:

• singing
  
• soft calm talking
  
• slip a pillow or thick quilt under her head
  
• change of activity / distraction
  
• silly/fun people games
  
• glider rocker
  
• Baby Einstein MP3s/CD
  
• change of venue
  
• sit in highchair
  
• chewies
  
• pillow squishes
  
• bouncing on therapy ball
  
• back off / alone time
  
• pressure to the head / body-sock on the head

We've been trying very hard to take a thoughtful approach to this, trying not to panic, working to figure out the behavior and keep things from escalating, praying that the switches will slide sooner rather than later. From a behavioral perspective, the headbanging does seem to be a frustration reaction, even though sometimes it doesn't take much to set it off. ("Okay, Joy, let's go potty now"... BANG.) We also suspect there's a big sensory component. Some pressure -- quite a bit of head pressure -- feels good. We'd like to get her to choose other forms of expressing frustration, such as pressing her own hands to her head, or stomping her feet.

Of course the question of a helmet has come up in our thoughts. How could it not? There's almost an easy-fix feel to the idea of wearing a helmet... at least keep the wearer physically safe, then we can figure out what to do about the behavior itself!

Alas, this is one of those truly not-simple things. My thinking on the helmet-question has been profoundly influenced by Kristina Chew, who has written a lot about her son Charlie and self-injurious behaviors. Their experience with head-banging in the past couple of years has taken them through full-time helmet wearing at one school, to a much better experience and very-occasional helmet wearing at his current school.

I'm going to quote a particularly relevant paragraph here, from a post of hers that's well worth reading in its entirety:

One thing I have learned from all this is that often the most obvious solutions just treat the problem people see, without addressing the deeper causes. Thus did the school district (and their lawyers) insist that Charlie wear a helmet. But that blue plastic apparatus has been the equivalent of a putting a band-aid on something serious that requires much more examination. The "protection" offered by the helmet was limited at best. As Jim and I predicted, Charlie banged his head harder while wearing the helmet (which makes for really big holes in the walls). He probably started banging more while wearing the helmet (in part due to the discomfort of the thing?)

Joy hates having things on her head. Won't wear hats, won't wear headphones, no earmuffs, no sunglasses. We're lucky that she is willing to accept a hood on her parka, because winters can be brutal around here.

Imagine the frustration level that could be caused/escalated by forcing Joy to wear an apparatus on her head -- when she's frustrated!

No easy answers. Fortunately the good times far outweigh the horrid, even if we spend a disproportionate time agonizing about the rough stuff.

Onward to kindergarten. Our little girl has her first day tomorrow, at a public school with a fine reputation. We like what we know of her team so far. Ready or not, here she comes. Keep thinking those good thoughts for us!

Transition

I've got a whole list of posts swirling in my head to write -- I guess I ought to at least get something written, and maybe the rest will fall into line in the coming days.

It's interesting -- in the world of developmental disabilities and special education, the word transition has come to have a specific meaning: it's the big Transition from school out into the adult world. There are transition-planning manuals, and transition-planning conferences, and transition-planning laws (in Wisconsin, for example, transition planning has to start in the IEP team at age 14, and at that age the student must be invited to participate as a member of the IEP team.)

Heh.

We've got a huge transition going here, folks, but it's into school instead of out of it.

Transition-into-kindergarten planning for Joy started a couple of years back, when we made the decision to wait an extra year, so that with her early-summer birthday she'd be one of the oldest kids in the class instead of one of the youngest. Back in February, I described the steps we took to get Joy some formal kindergarten practice, spending several hours of each Tuesday afternoon at the school with her early-education therapists.

In April, we had a big summit at the elementary school to put together Joy's IEP, the Individualized Education Program that spells out goals for the upcoming school year, and what services she'll receive that will help her work toward those goals. Looking back now, I guess I never did blog about that meeting. It was a huge meeting -- Joy is going to have a LOT of staff working with her. She's going to have one-on-one attention all the time, safety reasons being paramount but also because that's what it's going to take to work with her in a classroom -- and the school district seems to have quite the commitment to working with kids in the regular classrooms, as much as ever possible.

So far, things seem to be falling into place pretty neatly. Joy was assigned to the teacher whose classroom she got to know in the spring, a fellow with a gentle demeanor who has been assigned clusters of kids with IEPs for the past couple of years. One of her (typically-developing) classmates will be from a family we're in good contact and on good terms with, so that's a fine development. Her special-education lead teacher has had the chance to visit her at daycare for a couple of hours, and will be visiting at home the day before school starts to get acquainted. Joy has had a couple of visits to school, seems comfortable in the classroom (at least when there aren't any other kids there, heh), got to meet the new principal, and got to try potty-routine in the hall-bathroom.

We've got another summit with school staff coming up Monday, not an IEP meeting but a chance to share a home-grown document full of details about the amazing progress Joy has made over the summer, and tips for lunch, and a list of the songs she knows and can fill in words for.

And a list of the new challenges. There are some big ones, and it's more than a little scary.

The top two are: head-banging, and hitting/hair-pulling/pinching of peers and adults.

Just what you want your kid to develop in the months before kindergarten, no?

I think I'll just leave that there. These are switches that we desperately want to flip the other way, as soon as possible. A new environment and routine might do just that -- or it might escalate these behaviors to whole new heights.

Meanwhile, this is all quite a major transition for me. I wrapped up my summer-job yesterday, so I will truly be going back down to half-time again, as opposed to the 75% time that I've been squeezing in for close to a year. All those work hours will now take place during school hours, so I can do drop-offs and pick-ups for both girls at school, and eliminate the need for after-school paid care. A very different routine for me.

Think good thoughts for us. This transition may not be THE big one, but it's pretty much the biggest one so far.