Day care winnage

[marydell]

Charlie's PT wants us to get a tall toy grocery cart for him to walk more, since regular walk-behind toys are too short for him and he just kneels behind them.  (He's not walking or standing independently yet, so that's the current focus in therapy).  I dropped him off this morning at day care and walked him down the hall, holding his hand--practice, practice, practice--and stopped and said Hi to the director on our way to the classroom.

director: Charlie, look at you walking in your big-boy shoes! 
me: yep, we're working on it! I found an extra-tall toy grocery cart online that I'm going to get for him to practice walking behind.
director: Oh! Can you order a second one for here? I'll pay you for it!

One teacher is also taking him out of the infant room after lunch and walking him down to the gym* and practicing standing on the mats there with him--1-on-1 time, even though their ratio for infants is 4 kids to 1 teacher, and for toddlers it's higher than that.  (He is still classed as an infant because of the not-walking, even though he's aged out of the infant category.  If we wanted to get all ADA on them, we could come up with some mitigation like an individual care person so he could be put into the older-toddler group without being able to walk, but we're holding off on that until he's 2. If he's still not walking then, we'll have to move him up one way or another, for social & intellectual reasons. )

They really seem to care about teaching him stuff and helping him with his delays, which is pretty great considering it's a ginormous group center.

Also, they recently sent home a little packet of paper holiday ornaments that he had "decorated" - they were paper cut-outs of trees and snowmen and stuff with some finger paint on them.  In the pack was a little pair of paper cut-out mittens strung together with string, the way kids' mittens are, and they were labeled "charlie's mittens" in marker and decorated on the front.  I assume they did a pair of these for all of the children.  Anyway both of Charlie's paper mittens are right-hand mittens, which I thought was really cute.  Maybe it was just a happy accident but it made me smile.

*one advantage of a having him in a big group day care.

Comments

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised they don't have him with his age group. Our third kid has a physical disability and didn't walk till he was three years old (first independent steps ON his third birthday!), and his day care always kept him in age-appropriate groups. He crawled around on his belly in the room, and when they left the room the teachers put him in a stroller or such. As far as I remember, no one ever suggested doing anything different--and this was 20 years ago. (And because the teachers didn't make a big deal of it, the other kids were perfectly fine with it.)

[marydell.livejournal.com]

The issue is that non-walking kids in with the walkers are more likely to get injured because of trampling and pushing. There are 8 kids per 1 teacher at that age level (for a total of 16 per room), as opposed to 4 kids per 1 teacher in the "infants" room (which normally goes up to 18 months, so he's only 1 month older than a couple of the other kids in there). To move into the all-toddler space the day care wants the kids to be 1. at least 14 months old 2. self-feeding 3. walking. Once he reaches 24 months there's a different room, which we'll push to put him in with whatever extra staff he would need to be safe, even if he's not walking at that point.

If his disability was directly walking-related, we would handle this differently, but since the walking is only delayed by a few months (at this point) we're focusing on catch-up. For other things, like drinking out of a cup, he just isn't going to do things the same as the other kids (they use a cup with no handles, which requires 2 hands) and the school is fine with us doing things differently.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean to sound critical (if I did), I was just surprised.

Our son never got hurt by other kids, even though he was crawling on the floor. The other kids were very good about watching out for him. I think this was probably a great life lesson for the other kids. Years later I asked a friend whose son had been in that day care class, "Did [her son] ever say anything about [my son] crawling around on the floor?" She said, "No, the only thing I remember him ever asking was, why are [my son]'s eyes different from mine?" My son is Korean and hers is white; I think there were other Asian kids in the room, but my son and this boy were best buds, so he probably noticed my son particularly. I thought that was a sign that the teachers did a REALLY good job of making my son's disability just an everyday part of life.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

No worries :) I think our school's way of doing stuff is partly driven by liability & licensing rules etc...but also the next older group are still all kids under 2, so they seem to gallop over each other without really noticing much about their peers. Kids in the 2-4 range seem more conscientious, and also they notice Charlie's limb difference sometimes whereas kids under 2 never seem to. There are 2 or 3 older kids with noticeable differences that I've seen in the day care and they seem to be in with their peers.

[queen-nala.livejournal.com]

That is awesome and so reassuring!

I love the two right handed mittens!