IEP

On Tuesday, we had Emily's IEP meeting (Individualized Education Plan).  This was the meeting to discuss the results of all the testing we have been doing with various specialty staff within the school district (as we transition her into the school district for early intervention) and the services they feel she needs.  The actual document is a legal document and the school district is required by law to meet all of the requirements in it, so it is a pretty serious meeting with many ramifications for Emily's future.

Since there is no short way to summarize this, we will start at the beginning.  Emily was admitted into the special education program with a primary disability of visual impairment and a secondary disability of other health impairments.  For the most part, the reports were good.  She is doing very well in virtually every area except what they call "visual motor skills".  Yes, there is actually a category for what Emily is delayed in.  I think I have said this before but the big idea is that she is delayed in any area that requires her to look/see and then do/act appropriately.  So, her speech and social skills, which do not require the use of her eyes, are at or beyond her age level.  Her use of her fingers to manipulate something (pencil, scissors, etc) is very delayed because it first requires her to see that the pencil is what makes the marks on the paper and then to see how another person is holding it and see how they are making the motion...all before she can finally try to replicate it with her own hand.  After that, as an added bonus, if she has trouble seeing the mark she has made on the paper, she may assume the mark is not even there, making her pen 'useless' and the task pointless.  It was pretty amazing to listen to so many specific ways that we use our vision to teach ourselves virtually everything we know and even more amazing to realize that she has learned many of them without that ability, or at least only a fraction of it.  I have a lot more respect for her now that I can see (even partially) how broad of an impact visual impairments have. Vision affects nearly every area of our lives and I am only now starting to understand just hard it is for my little girl.

Anyway, I know I mentioned before that she possibly had a dysfunction called Sensory Processing Disorder (which really just means you have trouble taking the cues from your environment - the ones you get from your senses - and responding correctly to them), and the Occupational Therapist definitely saw this clearly.  Previously, it has always been attributed to her early birth and fact that her nervous system never developed properly.  However, this OT believes there is a strong chance that Emily's SPD could be attributed to a lack of information from her vision center.  Why does this make me happy? If this is true, as she matures and becomes more familiar with the world around her, she could outgrow most of it!!  It could take years but even the idea that it might go away some day gives this Momma more hope than she needed to hang in there and stick with it.

So, what is the bottom line?  Emily has been admitted into a general education class of pre-schoolers (meaning she is not in a special education classroom) but within the special education program.  They call it "main-streaming" for those familiar with that term.  She will have a special education teacher with her for at least part of the day every day to help her more one-on-one with learning her skills.  She will also be pulled from the classroom to meet with the occupational therapist once a week and will do the same with the consultant for the visually impaired.

Her goals are simple - to learn pre-writing skills (copying shapes and lines), learn to stay on task for longer periods of time (yeah, we have a little attention deficit but it is not enough to diagnose anything since she is inconsistent with it), to learn to recognize her letters, numbers and colors, and to use scissors.  It seems simple enough, but they cover some pretty technical skills.  :-)  They approved her for four hours a day, five days a week.  We will not be taking all that time as that is right over our weekend.  So we made a deal for two hours a day (to start - as was recommended by all involved since we can work her up in time but two hours is probably her limit right now) on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.  The school is a few miles from here and very nice.  We visited last week for a couple hours.

Overall, we are very pleased with how the meeting went, with the results of her testing, and with the services the school district offered.  We think this is going to be very good for Emily and we hope it jump-starts her development in weak areas.  We are very apprehensive about how this will affect big sister.  K already doesn't understand why Emily gets to go to school and she doesn't and we have barely talked about it.  Even A and Z can't compete with playgrounds and a super cool classroom.  K will be with me as we are going to have to drop Emily off and pick her up together...and she will see it all.  M and I were talking about how hard this is.  We understand intellectually that Emily has more because she needs more. BUT, as a parent, it feels so wrong to watch one of your kids "get" more than the other.  It's incredibly hard to keep your wits about you and make sure your brain and rational reasoning always win out over your emotions and your desires.  We want our children's lives to be equal, but they aren't.  At some point everyone faces the fact that life is just not equal or fair in any way, and in reality, I guess we have been facing it since the day Emily was born.  She was born with less and thus is offered more.  We know the reasoning and the logic to it all, we understand.  We have just never had to try to explain it to a three year old before.

Honestly, from my perspective, I am happy to have some time alone with K.  I have never had time to spend just K and I, ever really.  Remember?  She was only 9 months old when Em was born.  I know the transition will be hard but in my heart of hearts, I have great hope that if I get her to focus on the fact that we have "Mommy and Me" time all the time now, she will begin to love it too. I think my best shot is to incorporate lots of "big girl" activities that we only do when Emily is at school, she will start to catch on that maybe this isn't such a bad thing.

Well, that is already far to long.  I hope your day is blessed by the presence of God and thank you for all your prayers!  This process has been long and time consuming but went as well as we could have possibly hoped for.  God is certainly taking care of the details, like he promised!