Wordy Wednesday

We had a very successful meeting today at Drew's school. He's been having some issues with compliance. So we met to discuss what could be done about it. He perceives something as too difficult, and he refuses to do the work. Anxiety dictates a lot of what Drew does and doesn't do, so we tried to come up with ways of making his work less stressful. A lot of schoolwork is doing worksheets, which taxes Drew's poor fine motor skills. We think he is getting discouraged, so have come up with ideas for making him feel more successful. Like using rubber stamps instead of handwriting, doing more on the computer, using a weighted pencil when he does have to do handwriting, using social stories for particularly anxiety-producing activities, etc.

The thing I like about his school is that they are willing to try new things with Drew because I think they really care whether he succeeds or not. Something that tickled me was that his teacher had made a list of all the things Drew does well. This was not a regular IEP meeting or a scheduled parent-teacher conference, but a meeting to discuss these particular problems. So I thought it was cool that she came up with this list, a good reminder of all that he has accomplished, and not just focusing on the "bad" stuff. We have a real parent-teacher conference in about a month, so we can talk about how these new ideas have worked.

We picked Blake up from Eric's mom's house and she said that he wouldn't eat the toast she made him, and he couldn't even be enticed with Pringles. He did drink a lot of milk. She asked if we thought he had a sore throat. She said he was coughing a little bit and had been pretty quiet. (He had woke up several times during the night, so around 4:00am, I gave him a Melatonin.) Thinking maybe it was still in his system, we decided to wait and see about whether to send him to school or not. I think sometimes it is hard to decide what to do.

I didn't want to send him if he was sick and have them call me saying to come get him. That always makes me feel like I should have known better than to send him in the first place. But then I hate to keep him home if he is going to run around the house and act fine. So, today, I thought it best to err on the side of caution and keep him home. He ate his lunch fine, and had snacks in the afternoon. He does have a bit of a cough, but no fever or anything, so I am guessing I'll send him tomorrow.

Unless it snows and school is cancelled. But I think that is supposed to start tomorrow night. I believe we are to get 4-8" of snow here. It is 14 degrees here now. Yuck. Have I mentioned I hate cold weather?