A school for Edda.

Today we visited the Genesis School. There are about 100 students there with varying degrees of disablilties, some have autism, some Down’s syndrome, some cerebal palsy, most of the kids have a mish-mash of diagnoses and some kids are probably undiagnosed and have unnamed developmental delays. Before I had Edda, I know walking into a special eduacation school would have made me quite uncomfortable, but today as I looked at all these kids struggling with their own challenges, I felt a wave of relief come over me and a feeling of belonging. Finally! A place where Edda can hang out! A place where it seems happy, cheerful and sunny even though the kids are flapping their arms or not looking at you when you talk or signing words or whatever. The school is not too fancy or too plain and there is a sense of community there. There are support groups and they know all the places that cater to special-needs kids, dentists, doctors, hair-cuts, etc, etc.

We almost didn’t go check this school out because their website says that they won’t take Edda until she’s 2.5, but the principal was very accomodating and is willing to work with us and basically we can hang out at the school as much as we’d like. We didn’t take Edda with us today, but we are bringing her back tomorrow and the principal said that she’d be willing to work with us to slowly bring Edda into the school’s program. Yah!

Also, speaking about schools, Vince is speaking in full sentences in Chinese now. He can say “I have eyes” and “I love my body” in Chinese (they are doing a unit on “myself” this term). I’m amazed at how quickly he can pick these things up, it’s only been 7 weeks of school, only 1 hour a day of Chinese and he’s got full sentences coming out of his mouth with good pronounciation. I know that all this focus on Edda is stressing him out, I hope that this period of intense emotion will pass soon and that we’ll be “just regular folks” again soon…