Odds n Ends

After more than two years of waiting it's finally happened....Eliana has a loose tooth. She has had friends lose teeth multiple times over but her teeth weren't budging. I was half afraid she inherited her father's weird teeth issue (he still has at least four baby teeth) but she was so happy to discover a few weeks ago that one was finally a little wiggly. It's still hanging in there and I ask for a progress report now and again because she likes to demonstrate how she can move it back and forth. Another tooth actually joined it's ranks today too so we will have to see which one falls out first.

After a year and a half of talking, a year of preschool, an early childhood screening and a K-1 screening we have decided to put Meirah in K-1 instead of Kindergarten this upcoming fall. She will do a year of K-1 and then move into Kindergarten after that. This has been a constant conversation between Andrew and I for well over a year. Because she has a summer birthday she is eligible for a program our district offers called

 K-1. It was developed for kids who have late spring and summer birthdays who might not be ready for Kindergarten (which is all day, every day in our district). Our difficulty in making a decision as to where she was going to go in the fall was based on two things: her early childhood screening (that she aced) along with her desire to learn but also her lack of confidence,  her insecurity and her sensitivity.

K-1 goes every other day and has a similar schedule as Kindergarten but is a little more loosely structured and  they don't get as advanced ( sounds crazy but these days they start reading in kindergarten and by the end of the year are doing basic math). We didn't want to hold her back if she was ready to learn but we have serious concerns about her serious and sensitive little self. This is the child that caused me to have to apologize to strangers over and over again because when she was a baby and toddler she would burst into tears when a stranger would smile at her while she was sitting in a shopping cart or stroller . She also didn't have anything to do with her uncle Joe until she was well over two years old (for no reason that we can figure out). She's the kid that worries about not knowing how to read the names on her valentines and who bursts into tears when she has to ask the person behind the counter at the Cold Stone for a spoon and who still asks for "uppies".

We enrolled her in preschool to help get her ready for school, we have talked about the pros and cons of sending her to Kindergarten, I have talked to numerous people about this issue, read articles and even the thesis paper of  a graduate student who cited several studies on this topic. Even then we still were not sure but then we brought her to the K-1 screening. The K-1 teacher observed her in a classroom setting, reviewed the form where we cited our concerns and recommended she go to K-1.

It just so happened that the day I was waiting for the K-1 teacher to call me with her recommendations 

I bumped into a therapist I used to work with at my old job. We were chatting about kids and in her case grand kids when I mentioned my dilemma. She said that in the past eight years, as she has worked as a therapist at the High School, she could always see a difference in the kids in each class who were older and those who were younger. The younger kids had more difficulties coping and adjusting and with the pressures kids face these days...well she just encouraged me to consider giving her the leg up. Then the as that conversation was ending the K-1 teacher called me on my cell phone to recommend Meirah for the program. I asked her about the two issues I was concerned about: whether she would be challenged enough and of course since this program was in a different school than the one Eliana goes to, I was wondering how we could work out the scheduling.

What sealed the deal for me was that the teacher has decided to group her kids into small groups next year according to ability so that those who are able to do more will be able to.  She also told me that Meirah and  her classmates would be dismissed earlier than the rest of the school so that they could ride a bus (with just a teacher and other kids from the class) to their home elementary school so she could do after school care with Eliana at Horace May and we could pick them both up there.

We are hoping that this will be a confidence booster for her so that when she starts Kindergarten she will have had a year of school already under her belt...but really all we know at this point is that being a parent is really hard sometimes and making these types of decisions are not very easy.