Taking the Scenic Route

warning:  excessively long post, written over a number of sittings, mostly so I can process the day and remember what I need to for later meetings.

Zane started Kindy yesterday.  It was orientation, so no backpacks or school supplies yet, and they spent the day mostly explaining rules and procedures and things like that, with some group book reading thrown in. 

I wish I could say it all went smoothly.  It wasn’t a disaster, but it wasn’t really all that smooth either.  I suspect it will go a LOT better once he is in his regular classroom and they start doing things.  He really doesn’t do well with directions given verbally, especially the insane amount they had.  I am pretty sure he wasn’t the only kid in the room that was not really getting everything though.  He will learn by doing, and they only “did” so much today. 

Apparently, the school uses a LOT of sign language to communicate to the kids in group settings.  That requires him to look up, which is even more of a PITA than trying to get him to listen.  I am thinking of talking to STs to see if they can help with this.  I can think of things to do to help, but I don’t have the energy right now.

When we arrived, they had 4 trays on each little table, with 20-30 plastic cubes that could be connected together.  This was a great starting activity as kids arrived and Zane understood immediately how to play with them and enjoyed it.  On a funny note, I was concerned about how he would respond when kids said “hi” to him.  He ended up at the quietest table.  Not only did they not say hi to each other, I don’t think any of the four boys even talked. 

While they were doing that activity, the pulled each child out into the hallway to get a photo of them.  Zane, naturally, didn’t look up, but that was pretty par for the course.

Then they had all the kids sit on the big rug.  The first part was spent explaining how to sit.  Some of the things that sort of irritated me, as the mom of an ASD kid, was all the cutesy little euphemisms they used.  To sit on the rug, they said “criss cross applesauce” which meant you were supposed to sit cross-legged (I am guessing “Indian Style” is not PC anymore).  And then you were supposed to pretend your hands were “spoons” and your lap was a “bowl” and you were instructed to “put your spoons in the bowl”.  I’m starting to sound like Zach here when I say “Just say ‘put your hands in your lap’ and be done with it.  That other is of no use outside that particular school. 

Then they worked on how to stand in a line.  That was a really low moment.  Up until that point you couldn’t really tell the difference between him and the rest of the class.  He did not understand what they were doing, plus, they were spending f.o.r.e.v.e.r just talking and not actually going anyplace.  They wanted all the kids to put their hands behind their back (with another cutesy phrase “put your hands home” or something stupid like that), face forward, and look at the teacher.  (yeah, and they kept waiting for all the kids to accomplish this at the same time.  So, it was far too long of wait for Zane, especially when he didn’t understand what was going on)  Zane was surrounded by a few kids that seemed to be only a hair more functional than Zane at understanding directions (well, except for the cute girl that seemed to make her way near Zane much of the day), which didn’t help either.  One of them was wearing a super bright orange shirt (probably using the same theory I was when I dressed him in bright green…harder to lose track of him) and Zane seemed to follow that shirt around, and did an absolute meltdown when I held him into line.  He was screaming and melting down because I was waiting to be the end of the line because of how he was acting.  (nice circle of crap there). 

Got back to the room and had story time.  Again, enormous amounts of time spent on stuff that Zane only learns by seeing (including the criss cross/spoon nonsense), not listening to, so it was really rough waiting for the story.  Then they read the story, so slowly and quietly that I could barely hear it.  And they kept stopping to ask questions about the book.  This is why me getting a reading list before story time is important.  The first time through a book he is so driven to read the whole book, any break in the flow is going to be really hard for him.  Once he knows the story, he can dissect it a lot better and answer questions, but that is really hard for him the first time.  It was one of the Bindergarten books I have heard about.  I did not like it.  I will not buy it.  lol.  Most of the kids were pretty restless which means his peer models were not modeling very good behavior either.

During the story hour they started pulling kids to do individual accessments.  They pulled Zane fairly early and took him to a different room to do his accessement by the teacher he will probably end up with.  She wasn’t the one I was initially told it would be (but the initial one specialty is ESL kids, and a bilingual classroom is about the worse situation possible for him…he doesn’t have that thing that distinguishes one language from another and uses what Spanish he knows indiscriminately in what little talking he does). 

The teacher he will likely end up with has had autistic kids in her class before, was really tolerant of kids who develop odd routines, as long as it didn’t interfere too much with functioning, and maintains a very routine oriented classroom.  (she said to me several times during the morning not to worry about this being the norm, because the chaos and volume was about to drive her crazy too).  She had Zane read off letters, numbers, and shapes.  Instead of feeling like she was just placating me about his abilities in math, she seemed familiar with the concept that even though he is so delayed in language, he can still be smart, and he can still have strong abilities elsewhere.  She said that she was going to have to keep in communication about what they were doing in the classroom, so that if they were covering something Zane knew really well (and might display behavior difficulties from boredom) she would have him doing something on the computer instead.  She seemed to have a much more comprehensive grasp of what “autism” means than typical people and seemed to be on the better end of the spectrum of teachers I could get for him.  Time will tell, but the start is promising.

The line for going to recess was MUCH more successful, in part because they were actually GOING someplace, and in part because they didn’t stand there for 10 minutes talking to the kids.

Unlike much of the rest of the day, which was a combination of good/bad, recess seemed to be a total success for him.  He was mostly indistinguishable from his peers, and happy.  He shared a tire swing with two other kids, and the three of them spun and yelled to their heart’s content.  They followed each other down slides, and generally ran around looking like a typical group of kids.  Zane was happy.

Lunch went better than I anticipated too.  He finished off his chocolate milk before touching the food.  lol. He wanted the peanut butter sandwich over the pork sandwich (can’t say I blame him, the pork looked a little blah to me.  It was an uncrustables.  He wasn’t real sure about that, but took a few bites before putting it down. (he eats whole wheat, natural pb sandwiches cut into triangles, not the crustless circles with sugary peanut butter).  He saw the bag of teddy grahms and realized they were cookies and wanted those, then I actually had to feed him the little peach square because he wasn’t really convinced that it was fruit.  (he loves fruit, but this is fruit cocktail from a can).  He ate the rest of it once he got that first bite down.  He wouldn’t eat his pasta salad, but most of the kids didn’t either.  He eventually did go back to the pb, and was on his last few bites when they announced it was time for lunch recess.  That went pretty well too, but instead of teachers out there it was recess monitors who didn’t understand why I was there.  They were a little hostile, but I was glad to know they are really aware of adults hanging out on the playground and not afraid to confront them.

The afternoon things started overwhelming him a bit.  He was a bit more stimmy and his ability to listen was decreasing.  They read “chika chika boom boom” which is one of his favorite books, and he started reciting it when they took too long.  We read it very high energy, almost like a skat, spoken word song, complete with the sound of jazzy drum rifts through each page turn to keep the rhythm, so the really slow version of the teacher was about to send him over the edge. 

During the craft afterwards I started seeing evidence that he was starting to loose concentration.  He was really struggling to use a scissors, much worse than typical.  His leaves for the Coconut tree looked nothing like the lines he was supposed to cut on, the trunk was cut with a wide berth, but it wasn’t as scattered, and the coconuts, which were the hardest to cut, actually weren’t too bad.  He cut the circles with just 1/8th-1/4th inch around the line, but pretty consistently.  He did the gluing part really well and was able to write his name on it, although large, was written reasonably well.  He had pulled himself together a bit, which was a good thing to see.

Then he had music class.  Once again, a line.  Wasn’t too bad, but it will take a lot of work for him to understand putting his hands behind his back.  He sat front and center, which meant I couldn’t really get to him well. However, the music teacher seemed really good.  For one thing, she used very clear language to redirect kids back to what they were supposed to be doing.  She also used visual representations of the music patterns (a clapping pattern) they were doing to the hello song.  I thought that was pretty impressive since it is a field that is, by nature, almost exclusively auditory.  I actually felt like I didn’t need to be there through much of that class because she was handling the class, and the disruptions so well, and Zane didn’t really stand out that much in that class compared to some of the other things.  If you know what you are looking for, you could tell he was edging closer to a meltdown, but some of the other kids were acting out too, just in a more typical way.

Next, gym class, which ended up being the last class of the day for us.   I am guessing he had the snack and maybe art class left in reality, but the gym class was exactly the WRONG place for him to be at that point of the day for him.  He didn’t have anything left to cope with it.

In gym class, the kids aren’t allowed to run.    She had them walking around the gym, practicing walking and not touching each other, and then when she said “freeze”, they were supposed to stand like statues at first, and then she changed it to standing like statues with hands on your knees facing her, looking at her.  Yeah.  That went really, really badly.  Everybody walking all different directions, and of course a few of the boys start running, which sets Zane off running, and by this point in the day he has already been sort of stimmy for about an hour, so it was really too much to ask for him to follow directions in a big, echoy room, that smelled like food and sweat, with 20 or so other kids walking around chaotically.  Of course the gym teacher didn’t endear herself to me when I overheard her talking to the teacher who was explaining why I was there and she declared, not kindly, that “I thought we weren’t supposed to get autism kids here anymore”.  (the school used to have an autism room, so that is some of where it was coming from, but it sounded rather nasty to me).

I pulled him out in the hall and asked him if he wanted to go back to the kindergarten room or back in the gym.  His eyes were on the verge of tears, so when he was quiet (which often means that the question wasn’t quite right and he didn’t know how to tell me) I added “or do you want to go home”.  He wanted to go home, so we did.   

I don’t know how people felt about us going home, but so far he had enjoyed the day, and I wasn’t going to ruin it by pushing him too hard.  We made it until 2:30 or so, and I thought that was pretty good considering preschool was only 2.5 hours, and it was chaotic and new, and really, you can’t ask for a better day from him given the circumstances.

The day didn’t end for me there.  When I got home, Zach still had a high fever, Zora was cranky, Zach was out of medicine and we were low on groceries.  I got Zora dressed and took her to the grocery store with me.  I was so tired and sore from the day with Zane that I couldn’t chase her any more, so I put her in the cart.  She screamed, and she kept screaming the entire trip.  She tried to crawl out, she was picking up groceries within reach and throwing them.  It was miserable.  Every once in a while she would stop crying and screaming and scratching at me long enough to listen to a few refrains of a song I was singing.  It took an hour to get all the groceries and medicine.  Normally, if she acted like that I would have taken her home (the worse punishment in her opinion), but I couldn’t do that to Zach.  He had her all day and felt about as bad as a person can feel and not be in the hospital.  So, instead I got the stares and looks of people who either heard her screaming, or me singing, depending on when they saw me.  lol.

Our house is the worse it has ever been, Zach is sick, Zora is cranky, and Zane is stimmy.  My dad is in the ICU, although he is getting better finally, it will be a long process.  Mom has had the roughest week of her life.  There is also extended family that is having a rough time right now.  I am so sore, and tired, and I need to do just about every stitch of laundry in the house, clean up the snacks and toys and papers and general ’stuff’ that is on every surface of the house, vacuum, and mow the lawn.  And it is easily 100 degrees outside.  This week sucks.  badly.