In preparation for this year’s IEP go-around (which was last week) I filled out some lengthy assessments on my girl.  Everything from her self-sufficiency buttoning her coat to what I want her to be when she grows up. 

Woah.  These meetings, they’re not about the upcoming year.  They’re about all the upcoming years.  They’re about meeting the goal.

What’s the goal?

When preparing for this meeting, I thought a lot about where the best place for her to spend first grade would be. Keep her with her peers, put her in the sped class, or some variation in between.  I’m no educational expert by any means but I know my kid.  I kept my “yet” philosophy in the back of my mind as report after report told me what she can’t do.

• She can’t quite count to 100 like her peers.  Yet.  (Getting so close!)
• She can’t sound out a word despite knowing all her letters and letter sounds.  What she reads, she’s memorized.  It hasn’t clicked.  Yet.
• She doesn’t understand more than very simple directions. Yet.
• She’s not great at math.  …Neither am I so screw it.

YET… as our IEP meeting confirmed last week, she’s got all the friends.  All the friends belong to her.  Everyone wants to play with her, everyone wants to help her.  She watches them and learns so so much from them.  She comes home and tells me about them.  Not in the way that your kids probably do, with vivid stories, names or details. But in how she wants to play.  I know she plays tag, hide-and-seek, Duck-Duck-Goose and hopscotch (who knew kids still played hopscotch?) with them.  She learned those games from her peers.  She’s so happy and she’s grown so so much this year, academically and socially.

Pull her into a sped class?  That day may inevitably come… but in first grade?  NOT yet.  So grateful that those who work with her every day agree.

Happy.  The goal is for her to be happy when she grows up.