Easter treats

The actual card is a little bit different.

Most Saturdays, Xander and I take the trash to the landfill, then walk on the trail behind the dump.

Today, Ben & I took Xander to his Sunday respite-care provider then headed for Snead’s Farm for some pumpkins. I love how he knows his pumpkin as soon as he sees it.

Here are some more photos from the pumpkin-picking. Joe’s on the laptop, which has all my photo-editing stuff, so these aren’t the greatest (the one with me really needs some skin touch-ups!), but I’m sharing them anyway:

They’re for a template for a double-sided trifold card. I didn’t have many pictures of my actual family on the laptop–I was relegated to the upstairs tv for debate-watching while the guys watched football–so I used someone else’s family. I made some other cards, too, and I’ll put them in another post.

His bus was five minutes late. Xander grabbed his backpack and said, “OK, I’m ready.”

He boarded happily enough. And when I showed up at his school two hours later to drop off his meds and his PECS book, he was still happy and charming the staff in his classroom. I saw him in the hallway.

“I brought your PECS book so you can do some work,” I told him.

Xander rolled his eyes. Welcome to middle school!

In other news, apparently 10 is the magic age when it is not cool for your mom to go outside and take first-day-of-school photos.

I’m not ready! We went to middle school orientation today. Xander did OK, but it felt so surreal to me. It literally feels like just last week when we were leaving the hospital, he was swaddled in those thin cotton blankets and I was thinking, “Wait, you’re really going to let us take him home? What if we screw him up?”

Luckily, the school system distracted me so I haven’t had too much time to think about how old this makes me or to have melodramatic circle-of-life thoughts. At the end of the schoolyear, we sat down with his teacher and the administrators and picked where Xander would go to middle school. We only had two options–that’s how many self-contained middle school autism programs there are. One was pretty close to our house; the other 30 minutes away. The close program has been around for a few years; the other is new this year. We all agreed on the close program.

Two weeks ago, I get a call about middle school orientation at a school across the county from us. It’s not even the school where they told us the other program would be. I figured it was a mistake but called the school anyway. Sure enough, they had Xander registered.

“Um, do you have an autism program there?” I asked.

The secretary wasn’t sure. I was freaking out.  An administrator called and assured me there was a progam, it was fantastic.

“They told us the other one was fantastic,” I said. “We made a big deal about visiting the school, meeting the teacher. This is a severely autistic kid, who’s had the same teacher, the same classroom for six years. You can’t just spring this on him.”

But they can. And I heard good things about the class. So I sucked it up.

Today, we arrived at the school, and discovered Xander has a homeroom. And a schedule. With math, science, history, PE, English.

“There must be some mistake,” I told his homeroom teacher.

“No, he’s on my list.”

“Well, this is Xander,” I said, pointing at him as he stood in the doorway making his strange noises. “He doesn’t talk.”

I was about to mention he needs his diapers changed but she was already leading us to the guidance office.

We did eventually find his classroom. And things sound good. He’ll be in a class of four with three staff. And his teacher is pretty and blond, which he’s loving.

So I’m hopeful. It’s hard to leave his elementary school, where he was so beloved and treated so well. But who knows? He might charm a whole new school of people.

“Too bad that kid has no imagination,” Joe said when he watched the video.