There are times when I think am I doing right by my son. Is it right that I kept him home to homeschool versus sending him to our public school system? This one doesn’t take long to remember why I did what I did! Our schools system offered three schools to choose from, it was nothing short of “Garden of Shadows” tale out of the “Flowers in the Attic” series. I do a lot of comparisons with television shows and books I’ve read in the past. The part that stood out the most to me in the “Garden of Shadows” were where the main characters were hidden in the attic and weren’t able to come out to see the light of day…also they were fed poisoned cookies under the door to “rid” of these unwanted children. Hope I haven’t ruined the books for anyone, there are a lot more details I won’t touch…so read the books 🙂 Anyway, the first school, was in no way shape or form ready to deal with my son. He would have to carve the way the entire time he was there. There are good points to this, there are frustrating points to this, and yet later it was taken away from us as an option. The second choice goes back to that series of books. The special needs children are on the second floor. They never have the oportunities to see or be around the typical children on the first floor. They are completely steered clear. They are required to be part of the book challenge that the school system participates in, but are not permitted to go to the assemblies, they had seperate play grounds, seperate lunch rooms, seperate classrooms, seperate floors. There was one elevator that maybe held 2 wheelchairs and one person that is locked at all times. I felt like our kids were shoved upstairs out of sight out of mind. It broke my heart! So I knew this wasn’t an option. I had at this point decided to homeschool my son, but wanted an evaluation at the State School for the Blind. WOW! What a wonderful experience that was! but as there evaluation came to a close, they urged me to contact our school system and see if there was any other option. In my heart I knew it didn’t matter what they had to offer, we more than likely wouldn’t attend. We did go to the third option, it was much better than the second option but still I couldn’t help but picture him in his wheelchair in the corner chomping on his wrists for self entertaining. The teacher was excited, which considering school had already begun, it was refreshing. But I could see that she had her hands full, how was my son going to fit in here? I couldn’t see him fitting in, I could see him chewing on his wrists. My heart broke again, although I had already figured that this wasn’t going to be a good situation I still longed for him to have friends. We began homeschooling. (We’ll touch on this again soon)
Sometimes I wonder if he’s getting what I’m trying to do with him, I wonder if he understands the stories I read to him…but then in the past week we’ve seen him blossom in to a whole bouquet of colorful flowers. He’s been really “chatty” lately. Since the Botox last week, he’s really “moving” around. and he seems to be more aware of things around him…such as coming home from my mom’s house, laying him on the floor and he wanted his dad…so new vocals “da da da”…it was sweet sounds from my sweetpea…that I had to reply, “daddy’s at work, it’s just you and me tonight”. He smiled. Sometimes you can be having such a horrible time and then suddenly a giggle, a new word, a new movement, and new something can give you such a refreshed outlook on things…all we need is love.