Pinch me.

It’s hard to believe but, this morning, Eric and I attended an IEP meeting with Monkey’s teachers and his specialists and we left the meeting laughing. We have meetings scheduled every 4-6 weeks per his IEP and we love being able to touch base so frequently. We have daily contact with his main teacher both in person and by e-mail but less so with everyone else so it’s really nice to sit and hear what everyone is working on with him, what’s going well and what else they’d like to try. It’s nice to feel like we’re a part of the team…they take notes when we make suggestions. Whoa.

Today’s meeting was just so amazing…someone actually knocked on the window of the office and playfully shushed us because we were all laughing so loudly. Craziness. His teachers and specialists genuinely love Monkey ((*shocker*)) and appreciate his zaniness. They don’t see his personality as disruptive; they see the potential for using his sense of humor to bring out other skills. That’s huge!

First, part of why we were laughing is the obvious enthusiasm of his teachers. They get very, very excited when they’re sharing about Monkey. “Just look at this graph!” and his primary teacher will hold up something like this (this is totally made up but the graph looked a lot like this):

How can you not love someone who loves graphs? If you are a geek, like us, you simply can’t not love her.

Another part of why we were laughing is that Monkey is doing so amazingly well! One of the charts that his teacher showed us had data points that didn’t even fit on the graph! He is literally off the charts in areas. That makes our hearts positively sing.

Finally, we were laughing because Monkey has a terrific sense of humor and the stories they tell of him doing day to day tasks had everyone cracking up. His terrific sense of humor and all around lovely personality has created a bit of a problem though.

It seems that independent reading, just prior to Morning Meeting, is becoming a bit disruptive. Apparently everyone wants to read with Monkey and so he ends up surrounded by friends each trying to get him interested in their book. You can imagine how this might not go very well but…it’s not actually Monkey that is the problem! His teacher reported that he handles it really well, better than she would in his place even, but the other kids get loud and a bit pushy, lol. They are now assigning a reading buddy for him so everyone gets a turn reading with him. Nice problem to have, eh?

There was one last thing that made us laugh that has nothing to do with Monkey but the other students. They are all so interested in him that they follow his every move and recently his inclusion teacher found a piece of paper in the room. It was scrap paper they had been using and on the back was a random/general data tracking chart. The kids had been taking data!

Man…we have just hit the jackpot here. Awesome teachers, awesome specialists and awesome friends. Sometimes I think, “Pinch me, this can’t be real.” But then again, if it’s not, I like my dream world so just keep your fingers off!