First Day/Last Day

This is what I planned to post last Friday, before my blogging plans were precluded by that rather nasty episode. Friday was KayTar's last day of the first year of KayTar's school life. She had such a wonderful year and when I said goodbye to her teachers I had to pretend that it wasn't the end of the year to prevent myself from crying. They've been so wonderful with her and we will really miss them all, her teachers, her aides, and all the other teachers in the PPCD department. They've all taken a shine to KayTar, and she to them. I'm looking forward to her new program next year, but I hope the staff is as wonderful as the one at her current campus.

I was so nervous when she started school, my sickly, quite delayed, partially deaf, odd-duck of a little darling going off on her own for the first time. It has been wonderful, though, we've watched our quirky little caterpillar bloom into a social butterfly. So many of her developmental gaps have closed and she met most of her IEP goals for the year.

Medically speaking, her hearing loss progressed from moderate-severe to profound, rendering the cute little purple hearing aid useless. She had surgery to have her tonsils and adenoids removed and to have a g-button placed, which markedly improved her health and overall development. She missed over half of her first semester due to illness, but post-op, her attendance really improved. She has gained both height and weight this year, since having her tube placed (you might notice how much shorter her jumper is in the second set of photos, it is about 2 inches shorter on her in spite of lengthening it a bit). Her episodes stopped...and then restarted. She acquired a scary food allergy, which we suspect to be peanuts. We did more testing and still received no answers.

Developmentally speaking, her speech has normalized. The tendency she had to speak in direct quotes and parrot questions back to us is gone. She's fully conversational now and she uses this skill nearly non-stop. She can now walk across uneven ground, such as grass or mulch at the playground most of the time. She can walk up stairs in an upright position, relying on her stronger leg to do the work, sometimes without the handrail if I am scaffolding her. She can jump with two feet off the floor. She learned to write her own name.

It has been a big year for our little girl and we could not be more proud of everything she has accomplished!


First Day


Last Day




Coincidentally, today is MY first day of school for the summer semester. Too much math, here I come! Today starts the craziness that is school on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday nights and volunteering on Wednesday nights, not to mention BubTar's swim team practice on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday nights. Let's not discuss VBS and KayTar's camps or the fact that Josh is also taking summer courses. Isn't summer relaxing?