Aspie Dad

We had AspieBoy’s first annual review for his IEP this morning. More on that later (I’ll add things to this post). But first I need to work…

[later:] All in all, the meeting went well. Or as well as any encounter with a large entrenched bureaucracy goes. Here are a few late night tidbits from today’s meeting.

Some background: AspieBoy is three weeks past the cutoff for Kindergarten and there has been some recurring discussion -mostly from the school district- concerning getting him into K this upcoming year because of his size (almost 48″ at 4 and a half) and academics. If his social skills were on a par with those, I think we would be enthusiastic. As it stands he would be the youngest and likely largest in his class with (cough) poor social skills.

So we did a ‘kill -9′ on that notion. Fortunately both of our outside advocates that we brought into the process, (a Ph.D. psychologist and a M.Ed. educator who runs his day care) were right on board with that. He can skip a year of two of High School if that is appropriate and he wants to do that.

Some of the ‘cookie-cutter’ process of the District showed, but by and large, the IEP was tailored to AspieBoy. He was assessed as knowing all the letters and their sounds, most of the compound letter sounds and counting to somewhere around 30.

So, it was confusing to me when the first objective of next year’s IEP was ‘learn letter sounds.’ I said something I thought was clever and pertinent, but which Aspie(?)Mom informed me that, in fact, ‘no, it wasn’t.’

Some social recovery was made by suggesting that AspieAdults still need social training. And, they will remove the ‘learning letters’ goal and replace it with some fine motor skill work. Ultimately, thats what we wanted, so that is progress. And who says Aspies can’t learn social skills? We can be instructed, but that doesn’t mean we understand how NTs think.

And they wonder why I do research instead of public relations…

All in all the speech path said things were going well. AspieBoy is now doing complete sentence non-sequiturs (”there’s a bug on the sidewalk!”) rather than some sort of linguistic white noise when he seeks an interrupt. This is a big improvement over biting the kid next to him to get your attention.

Both of his parents are liable to insert Monty Python (or other popular culture) non-sequiturs into conversations, so we may be shoveling against the tide here. Or, he will come to see us as sad, sad social misfits over and above typical teen angst as we babble about ‘bring me a shrubbery!’ within earshot of his friends.

(yet another aside–I dimly remember being this way and how awkward and painful it was. I wish I knew how to reach him earlier than waiting for him to realize that it is not working and he better ask for some help. sigh.)

must go. tired. it’s 12:40am.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 18th, 2006 at 11:06 am and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.