I aten't dead
Aug. 3rd, 2025 09:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivendellroseI'm still alive and have once again remembered that I have a journal here! And... oh dear, it looks like it's been about a year since I last posted. Um. Very basic updates are called for, I guess.
I did indeed eventually recover my sense of smell after my bout with Covid last summer, which was very nice. Shortly after that, the Squidling started kindergarten, and we had a bit of a chaotic start to the year as his teacher had... not so much actually read his IEP. Oops. Got that resolved, things calmed down mostly, to the point where we (very optimistically) adopted a dog, who we named Astro, from a local rescue... and then everything went all to hell. The Squidling loves dogs, it turns out, but is too impulsive and, frankly, unwilling to adhere to rules, to actually behave well with a dog in the house, and the chaos of having a dog (who was both younger and more high-energy than we'd been lead to believe...) meant that he never got the calm down-time at home that was required to help him function moderately well at school. Due to that and a few other issues, we eventually made the sad decision to return Astro to the rescue.
(Astro is fine: he went into the care of a very experienced foster family who had a foster-fail dog of their own, with whom Astro immediately became best friends, and at last check they were so happy running around the yard together and then sleeping all over the people's furniture together that we're crossing all available appendages that they foster-fail with Astro, too. One sticking point of his time with us was that while he liked people fine, he really wanted a dog friend full-time, and that was never going to happen with us.)
Anyway. Kindergarten didn't go great. Squidling did not like school much, because he is super impulsive and unwilling to follow instructions, and he and his teacher butted heads basically all the time, and... things did not go well, anyway. The good news is, he loved his resource teacher, Ms. A, and likes many of his classmates, and still loves learning and reading and all that, so we're hard at work with his therapist and his resource teacher on plans to develop the good sides of things, and hopefully get him some medication to help him with his impulse control (in addition, of course, to non-medication methods like helping him think ahead and give rewards for good behavior, etc.).
Summer has been pretty good, with a friend and her kiddo visiting from out of town a good part of last month, and then a big week last week where we went to Point Defiance Zoo, then met up with several of Squidling's classmates and their families to watch the Blue Angels from a local park, and then a day of hanging out and going fun places with his grandparents the next day. Tomorrow he starts his second week-long day-camp of the summer, and they are prepared with strategies learned from his first day camp of the summer (as are we), so hopefully things will go well... and at the end of the month we'll get back to school!
I did indeed eventually recover my sense of smell after my bout with Covid last summer, which was very nice. Shortly after that, the Squidling started kindergarten, and we had a bit of a chaotic start to the year as his teacher had... not so much actually read his IEP. Oops. Got that resolved, things calmed down mostly, to the point where we (very optimistically) adopted a dog, who we named Astro, from a local rescue... and then everything went all to hell. The Squidling loves dogs, it turns out, but is too impulsive and, frankly, unwilling to adhere to rules, to actually behave well with a dog in the house, and the chaos of having a dog (who was both younger and more high-energy than we'd been lead to believe...) meant that he never got the calm down-time at home that was required to help him function moderately well at school. Due to that and a few other issues, we eventually made the sad decision to return Astro to the rescue.
(Astro is fine: he went into the care of a very experienced foster family who had a foster-fail dog of their own, with whom Astro immediately became best friends, and at last check they were so happy running around the yard together and then sleeping all over the people's furniture together that we're crossing all available appendages that they foster-fail with Astro, too. One sticking point of his time with us was that while he liked people fine, he really wanted a dog friend full-time, and that was never going to happen with us.)
Anyway. Kindergarten didn't go great. Squidling did not like school much, because he is super impulsive and unwilling to follow instructions, and he and his teacher butted heads basically all the time, and... things did not go well, anyway. The good news is, he loved his resource teacher, Ms. A, and likes many of his classmates, and still loves learning and reading and all that, so we're hard at work with his therapist and his resource teacher on plans to develop the good sides of things, and hopefully get him some medication to help him with his impulse control (in addition, of course, to non-medication methods like helping him think ahead and give rewards for good behavior, etc.).
Summer has been pretty good, with a friend and her kiddo visiting from out of town a good part of last month, and then a big week last week where we went to Point Defiance Zoo, then met up with several of Squidling's classmates and their families to watch the Blue Angels from a local park, and then a day of hanging out and going fun places with his grandparents the next day. Tomorrow he starts his second week-long day-camp of the summer, and they are prepared with strategies learned from his first day camp of the summer (as are we), so hopefully things will go well... and at the end of the month we'll get back to school!
no subject
Date: 2025-08-04 07:29 am (UTC)This is how I feel like things would go with Enting at school XD
Sorry the first year was a "learning experience" that you didn't want to have but hopefully it'll go more smoothly moving forward.
Also sorry to hear about Astro (last we'd chatted you were on the fence), but I'm glad he's found a home more suitable for him--and you.
But! Glad to hear from you!
no subject
Date: 2025-08-04 05:12 pm (UTC)I mean, in fairness, at home he just butts heads with me, most of the time. A lot of days I can't ask him to wash his damn hands without drama, so I can only imagine how things would explode if I tried to actually homeschool. Better he has the fights with someone else, so I can just be Mom. *sigh* We're working on it. All of it.
Astro was a great dog (as my dad says "They're all good dogs"), and I'm still a little sore about not being able to keep him... but I'm also very much not sore about not having the added stress and another thing I need to constantly be trying to manage. So... it works out. If we'd had a big yard, it would've been a whole different thing, but, y'know, city life.
Glad to hear from you, too! I will try to remember this thing, at least so I can check in with you on and off! ♥♥♥
no subject
Date: 2025-08-04 06:22 pm (UTC)The home ed thing is multifaceted, I guess. We don't do "school at home" we just learn by exploring resources (books, podcasts, field trips, etc.), and for every topic but reading/writing, that has been enough to put him on par (and often far ahead) of his age/grade mates. Reading and writing is different, he has a speech-sound disorder that affects that, so I get the resistance. We do a short "lesson" each day (and I mean like 5-10 minutes), heavily rewarded, and then spend the rest of the day exploring whatever is capturing his curiosity. There's a lot of ways to home ed, it doesn't have to look anything like school.
Also, I'm really enjoying not living on the school's time table. I did that for 13+ years of my own childhood, don't really feel the need to do it for another 13 of my adult life XD
(None of this is saying that you should homeschool, I'm just trying to describe our experience of doing so--the good and bad, ha ha.)