It’s finally officially summer. It’s warm, the days are long, and all our favorite foods are in season – black raspberries, strawberries, and pretty soon corn and tomatoes.
The Bunker Monkey is off school – for a week. He starts summer session next week – not because his academics are bad, but because he needs the structure so that he doesn’t lose all the advances he made this year in school. For those of you who might be new, Bunker Monkey has Asperger’s and SPD (Sensory Processing Disorder). He’s attended school since he was 3, at a preschool where they’re specially trained to help kids (and adults) with disabilities. When he turned 5 he entered the local public school’s kindergarten, though in the Communications room (what we used to call “Special Ed” when I was in school).
We’ve been lucky throughout all of this. Bunker Monkey’s preschool was amazing – I truly believe that if he had not gone there, his Asperger’s and SPD would be much worse than it is now. We’ve never had to fight the school district for services for him, and we’ve been lucky enough to get great teachers in every school he’s been in.
But still. There are challenges. I try to tell myself that he’ll probably be out of the Communications Room next year – but I don’t know that for sure. And there are days that we get a note home from school that makes it clear he still has a long way to go before he can join a “regular” class, if that ever happens. When he’s home for days on end – as he is during the ten-day break before the summer session starts and after it ends – it becomes even more clear that he still has challenges. His struggle to focus, or regulate his volume, or not chase the chickens after we told him a thousand times not to – all those things and more hammer home the true state of the Bunker Monkey’s diagnoses.
It is summer, though – and that in itself is a special kind of therapy for all of us. So we’ll enjoy the long days, and the warm weather, and try to let go of our worries for now. After all, isn’t that what summer is for?
