Sigh Of Relief

I know it's hard to believe, but this little cutie patootie has been causing me a bit of anxiety lately.

You see, next year she enters kindergarten. In an ideal world, this would not matter since I homeschool and kindergarten would be at our kitchen table and I wouldn't even have to think about it. But, because she still needs some speech therapy, I am enrolling her in actual kindie, with the hope to pull her out before first grade.

I have had a couple of concerns however:

1. What if she still needs services in first grade? That would be awful because I don't want her on the school curriculum- I want her on my curriculum.

2. What if I can't get her into Cloverleaf in first grade if the class is full? I would be so miserable to finally have an ENTIRE day once a week to get things done, and have it ruined because Cloverleaf is full.

Thankfully, my #2 concern was laid to rest when I talked to the woman in charge of Cloverleaf. She said Camille would automatically be put to the top of the priority list because she has siblings in the program, and she pretty much guaranteed Camille a spot. Phew!

Then, today I had my #1 concern mostly put to rest.

Today was Camille's transition meeting for kindie. I met with her current speech therapist, and her speech therapist for next year.

Her current therapists went on and on in glowing terms about how wonderful Camille is doing- and she is. You can understand everything she says, even though some of her sounds are still not quite right. She was impressed with how quickly Camille is catching on, she's using full and descriptive sentences (she said Camille is advanced on narration skills, which is fitting because she really does like to tell tall tales). She said Camille is a rock star who is meeting all of her goals well ahead of schedule.

In fact, next year she will only qualify for 30 minutes of speech a week. Assuming she continues to improve, I imagine she would qualify for even less in 1st grade (or none at all), and there's NO WAY I am putting in her in full-time school so she can get speech for 15 minutes a week. That is TOTALLY not worth it- we will just pay for speech ourselves.

I realize it's silly, but knowing that Camille will not have to go into first grade is such a relief! I try really hard to not worry about things which I can't control- especially if they are far into the future- but this really was causing me anxiety. Now that we have embraced this homeschool lifestyle, I just can't see me sending one kid to school full time while the rest of us get to play and be together (and do homeschool, of course).

So in the end, things are lining up to work out perfectly. Hallelujah!