It has been a long time since I have posted something. To be honest, I'm so busy during the day it's hard to remember to do it at night. :) Carson is doing relatively well at the moment.
We got our approval letter from the school district allowing me to home school him which makes me very happy. I was so afraid that I was going to make the wrong choice by not sending him to school that I really had to sit down and write out a pros and cons list. Part of my reason for having such a hard time with my decision was because we had an 'exit meeting' at school at the beginning of May. This meeting was held at the school with not only the preschool coordinator, his therapists and his teacher Amber but also with the special education department for the school district.
They explained to me that since Carson already has an IEP in place that they would honor it by having him ride a bus that had 5 point harnesses in them and he would also get a bus aide because he isn't able to get on and off safely by himself. Not only that, they were promising he would get an aide for the school day. Maybe not a 1-1 aide but possibly a 1-2 or 1-3 aide depending if there were other children who had similar deficits to Carson. Since we live in a small rural community the school does not have a nurse on staff every day. Because of his diabetes, they even offered to hire a nurse to be at the school full time for him.
I was so overwhelmed when I left that day. I have heard so many horror stories about people having to fight with everything that they have to try to get aides for their children and here Carson was being handed one basically without me even having to so much as ask. So when I got home I was literally in tears because I seriously was about to have a nervous breakdown. To de-stress I started making dinner. Carson was in the other room on his iPad but he kept coming into the kitchen trying to get into the freezer where his beloved chicken nuggets are. Knowing he was hungry, I kept shooing him away so that he wouldn't get burnt by the grease in the pan for the hamburgers and kept telling him dinner would be ready in a few minutes. When he came in for the 5th time again going for the freezer I finally just said, "Okay, what is in this freezer that you want so badly??" He opened the freezer and then pushed my hand in towards a box of Popsicles. Knowing immediately he was trying to tell me his blood sugar was low, I grabbed his meter and sure enough. 58. I swear I felt like I was about an inch tall. Here I was so preoccupied with making dinner that I didn't even have a clue what he was trying to tell me.
That was what made me realize that homeschooling him (for now) is the best option for us. There have been several times that he hasn't shown any symptoms whatsoever that he is low. This happened to be one time that he was able to communicate it to me. What happens if he is in the classroom and, by no fault of the teacher, she is busy with other students and completely misses the signs? The next day I sat down and filled out all the necessary paperwork and had it in the mail by the end of that week. They were supposed to give me a written answer within 2 weeks of them receiving the letter but I still hadn't heard anything by the end of June so I called the county. They told me that they had approved it on June 1 and sent it to the local school district. They thought maybe the superintendent was on vacation because several other families in the same school had already called too.
I finally got my letter on July 23. Of course it was dated June 9. I don't care though. I'm just glad that I got it. I am officially starting August 1. I am trying a child-driven approach since trying to get him to even look at something he isn't interested in is like pulling teeth. Yesterday he counted by 5's all the way to 100 on the whiteboard so I'm not too concerned :)
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