1st Day of Preschool 2011

Rori had her first day of preschool today. She has been so excited to go to school just like Kai. I wondered if her excitement would fade when it was time for me to leave, but she did great and wasn't phased at all. When I said goodbye to her she said "Bye Mom" and went skipping off hand in hand with a new friend from her class that she had just made.

This is the next big step of the Rori Story we've been on this year. When Rori turned 3 a few weeks ago she graduated out of the Early Intervention program and in to the school districts jurisdiction. In anticipation of this Rori was evaluated by several people from the district over the summer- speech therapist, nurse, school psychologist, hard of hearing coordinator, etc. Then this Tuesday we met with all of them to do her official IEP where they would tell us what services the school district would be willing to provide her based on her hearing.

We feel good about the outcome of the IEP as they accepted her in to the program that we had been hoping for. It is a language intensive preschool for kids who wear hearing aids. There are currently 7 kids in the class counting Rori (they can have up to 9) with one teacher and 1 full time aid. They also currently have 1 little girl in the class that is a "typical hearing" student who is there to be a good speech example. She is the one Rori went skipping off with. We met with the teacher yesterday and I thought she seemed great. She was enthusiastic and appeared to be very organized which speaks to me.

The good news bad news is that she will go to school M-F from 9:10 - 1:10pm. I know it is going to be so good for her, but I'm selfishly going to miss my time with her. I'm sure I'll be posting more about all the cool things she will do in this class in upcoming posts, but so far everything we've seen looks awesome. They will be academically prepping the kids just like any other preschool, but in addition the teachers are trained to specifically work with kids with hearing issues (who aren't deaf) to help expose them to as much language as possible in these early years. In addition there will also be a speech teacher that will visit the classroom a few times a week to work with the kids. We're really excited about it and hope that this will be a great thing for Rori for this first year of preschool. Assuming we follow the same August birthday wait to be an older pattern that we have done with Kai this could be the 1st of 3 years of preschool for Rori.

Thankfully the school offering this cool program is just about 10 to 15 minutes away from our house which is pretty amazing. But, it is going to be interesting figuring it all out with Kai's different school hours in the mix. Lets just say our mornings are going to be a little nuts. I am really looking forward to getting settled in to a routine though.

Hopefully Rori will continue to be excited about going. When I picked her up today she told me how much fun it was and she had done "great". Now she has a long weekend to rest up before a shorter week next week due to the holiday. Hopefully that will help ease her in. We were a little concerned about such a long day for her, but we'll see how it goes. She was super excited to get to take her own lunchbox today too like Kai.

So now I'm down to just one kid for a good portion of the day. It will be a little like going back to the Kai baby days. It will be nice to have that extra 1 on 1 time with Zuri. Maybe I'll even be able to get to some of those projects that I can never seem to find the time for. We'll see if Zuri agrees to that though since when she is awake she is probably the most demanding of the 3 at this time.