Growing Up

Today my son was moved out of special education at school. They did a whole series of tests: speech, classroom skills, standardized intelligence, psychological profile, the works. The end result is my boy is both too smart and too functional to be in special education. His math teacher was clapping, the speech teacher remembered his horrible first week of Kindergarten after telling me that his vocabulary tested better than a 10 year olds, the special education evaluator told me how delighted she was to be a part of this because he's only the second child she's ever moved out of special education. This is not to say that he doesn't still have some remaining issues. His social interaction is less that optimal. His spelling and punctuation are horrible.

When we had the first evaluation I fought the designation of autistic. I've seen autistic and I knew that wasn't quite my boy. The funny thing is that my nephew and his wife fought it for their daughter too, but as she's aged it has become clearer and clearer that she has Apsberger's syndrome. I insisted they code him PDD-NOS which means pervasive developmental delay not otherwise specified. I think I was right because my boy, has gone the other way. He is still socially inept, but his behaviour is better, his interaction is better, he's better. He was delayed and now it seems that he's growing up.