Becca the Blog is going to get noisy.

I promised an update on the school thing, this is not that update. I'd say it's still in progress.

As part of the ongoing-ness, though, I'm going to start posting some sessions that we're doing with Becca after school.

Basically we didn't know just how capable Becca was, and we've been surprised with some of the things she's been doing since the beginning of summer, and I wanted to see just what she could do. Then that sort of evolved into an experiment to see how close we could get to a first grader's curriculum with Becca.

I took the state core standards for first grade and started marking all the ones I thought Becca could learn but probably wouldn't learn unless someone spent some time with her. I was surprised, actually, with how few I wrote off as out of her reach. Turns out the hardest thing in first grade is math, the rest is very approachable for Becca with some straightforward adaptations.

So then I took those standards and organized them into categories that I thought we could work on at home. Things like "order & organize", "sun & moon", "creative piece of writing", "jobs & roles", etc. I was curious just what we were up against in scope. In the end there were about 36 categories of work, and with 35-ish weeks in the school year this was starting to sound not impossible.

Since then we've been working with Becca on some of these categories. Every time after we work with her we take detailed notes of what happened, trying to keep out our own interpretations and noting our biases as we find them. Mostly we want to have evidence of just how capable Becca really is. Because it turns out she can remember a lot of things, and she likes interacting and communicating with her eyes. She likes "school time", as we call it.

But that means this blog is going to get a lot noisier than it has been, for the foreseeable future. Feel free to unsubscribe, we won't get our feelings hurt :-). If you hang around, I'm going to put "school time" in all the titles of these logs so they'll be easier to skip over.

New House and Preschool

With moving to a new house I was worried that it would take Becca a while to adjust, but she has done great! The whole time we were looking for a house we kept telling Becca we were looking for a house for her. She seemed to say, we finally moved to my house! She has a bigger living room to roll around in and her very own bedroom.

Becca started preschool last month and it has been an adjustment for all of us. We went in the week before she started and met her teacher. We absolutely love her. She is so good with Becca. I was excited to hear that she had a girl with rett in the past. It has sure been nice that I haven’t had to explain all about Rett. She seems to understand Becca and her needs. We’ve started with her going Mon/Wed from 9-11 and we’ll see how she does with that.
So this year we decided to send Becca on the bus. She went on a field trip last year and they took them on the bus. I was told she smiled and giggled the whole way. So, I thought this would be something she would enjoy and would give her a little more independence and lengthen her preschool time a little bit. Anyway, the first day came and I hadn’t heard anything from the bus. So I assumed they hadn’t got Becca’s information yet but I was totally h
appy to take her. As I went out to pack up the bus pulled up. I was like…oh ok so I pull her wheelchair out and assemble it (I’m getting faster at this but I’m still sort of slow). Then I ran in and got Becca, brought her out and strapped her in. I totally expected the bus driver to introduce himself and ask about Becca. But no…he actually didn’t really say anything. He quickly strapped her in while I’m chattering away about how I didn’t know if the bus was coming and about Becca. Nothing…and then he drove off. With my precious child. And then I cried. Like a lot. I had just sent my sweet daughter who has special needs with a stranger who didn’t seem to even look at her. I had no idea if Becca was scared. I hoped he took her to the right school! I truly felt like a horrible mom. My sister was in town so I could thankfu
lly leave Katie with her. I waited a little while to give Becca time to get to school and get settled and then I drove to the school to check on her. It turned out that it was good I went. Her teacher had a few questions about her wheelchair and it was good for me to be able to see Becca happy and in one piece. I also found out that the strange bus driver was actually a sub. Whew. Here’s Becca on her first day of school with her backpack that is actually my old backpack. How embarrassing! Sorry Becca :).

The second day of school Becca came off the bus crying :(. I said, oh no! She’s crying! And the bus driver told me that she actually cried the whole way there and the whole way back. Well that broke my heart. I called her teacher right away and asked her how she was coming off the bus. Again, it was good I called because her teacher said she was really upset coming off the bus and it seemed like she was aspirating. Great. She had a swallow study done last year that she passed, but I know that she is at a high risk for this. When Becca gets sad and worked up, thick mucus builds up in the back of her throat. She feels like she is suffocating because she has a hard time swallowing. Pretty scary. Anyway, this whole bus thing wasn’t ok with me if it was upsetting her. So her teacher and I came to an agreement that I would bring her to school and then she would come home on the bus. I felt so good about that because then she would still get a chance to get used to the bus. The first day of this was wonderful. I hear she was happy at school and she came off the bus happy. Apparently she has a new boyfriend on the bus too.
Becca has been in a good place lately. Though we haven’t seen any fine or gross motor improvements she has been really happy. She seems to be trying to communicate through her eyes more which has been really wonderful too. She’s finally over her cold (we all passed a cold around a couple weeks ago and like always hers lasted like two weeks longer than ours because she can’t get rid of congestions)! For the most part she has been sleeping well (last night she was awake until like 11 just chatting away, but she doesn’t usually do that). She hasn’t had any seizure activity that we’ve seen lately as well. All wonderful things!

First Day of School

Well, I sure never thought my daughter would have her first day of school at the age of three! Yep, Becca started preschool a couple weeks ago and this it how she feels about it...

This is so not what I pictured her "first day of school" picture to be like

Yep, she loves it! She loves all the attention she gets and watching all the other kids. She is currently on spring break (I asked her what she wanted to do for spring break and she just sort of looked and me like, ummm, what?) but she'll be back to school next week. She starting out with just an hour and a half on Wednesdays and Thursdays (because it's a smaller class on those days). She'll work up to staying the whole 2 and 1/2 hours.
You ask how mom is doing with this new development? Well, I guess I must first confess that I haven't actually left her at school yet. I've stayed with her the entire time all the times she's gone. I guess that makes me a wimp. But, I must say that it has made me a lot more comfortable about leaving her in the future because I know exactly what she does when she's there and I'm getting to know her teacher. Her teacher has been wonderful so far. She's so willing to let me come as long as I want to. I'll probably stay at least another week or two.
Preschool consists of play time (for Becca this is usually speech therapy), gym time (sometimes physical therapy for Becca), circle time (singing songs, story time, learning a letter of the alphabet, etc.), activity time (painting, coloring, crafts, etc), and snack time...we leave at this point so who knows what happens next! For all I know they could have spanking time next! Yikes! Ok, so I know what happens next, potty time. Becca has potty time 24/7 so I guess that won't be all that eventful for her and then reading time and then, something else that's probably cool.
This whole preschool thing was really hard for me as the day approached that Becca would be starting, but it's really a lot easier now that I see how much she enjoys it. Any guesses as to how long I will be attending preschool with Becca? Your guess is as good as mine.