Homebound: The Middle

As the title says, we are somewhere in "the middle" of Connor's homebound program and early on in his incremental return to school. He's back in three of his courses (math, language arts and social studies). He has only been in math for two days as he just attended school for Monday and Tuesday last week due to the Thanksgiving break. As we are heading back to school after a five day weekend, we are hopeful he will be back in Spanish by the end of the week. We’ve been fortunate as Connor has only had one giant setback day so far where he couldn’t go in at all. That’s not to say each day has been easy, but he has gone in and finished the classes he was going for.

Speaking of good fortunes; Gretchen was fortunate enough to secure a science teaching position rather close to home.  The timing could not have been much worse, but after we spent considerable time trying to figure out how all of this would work we decided we simply could not pass up this blessing and opportunity (especially considering she didn't land a position after looking all summer).  Of course, this put a huge amount of stress on all of us trying to fitre out how we could work through Connor's incremental return to school via the homebound program with Gretchen no longer being available during the school day.

While trying to sort it all out, we were blessed again.  This time by way of Gretchen's mother agreeing to put her life on hold and coming out for an extended visit to help us out.  This is truly a blessing and I cannot thank her enough.  Thank you Sharon; you are a great Oma!  She was able to come out at the end of his first week of going back to school for a single class.  At this point, I'm POSITIVE she's getting tired of being a chauffeur and math tutor, but her love for Connor is surely helping her.  Again, thanks so very much, Sharon!!

We did get the school to agree to not worry about his first two "connections" periods (ex: orchestra, PE, art, etc) for the rest of the Fall semester.  Therefore, our final push is to get him back into his combination Lunch/Advisement (like a study hall) period and then onward into the final two classes of the day; Spanish and science.  If all goes according to plan (what ever does?) then he will start attending his science class on Dec 5th and then focus on wrapping up the semester which ends on the 19th. 

This is definitely a journey, but one that Connor really needs to be on.  TS+ has been VERY tough on him this year (and unfortunately, will contine to be tough for him for a long time to come), but we are all very positive and hopeful that this opportunity we have been given to get him involved in regular counseling again and to be more integrated with his neurologist and psychologist will put him on a more even keel to finish 7th grade with a level of confidence and emotional well being that we believe will help him in the school years to come.