Starting Preschool

The beginning of 2005, when Michael started preschool, was a very hard time.  He still didn't have an official diagnosis, so we had no proof of what we were asking.  His preschool teacher was quite unsupportive of us as well, which really didn't help matters.  I remember at one of our initial meetings with her, offering the suggestion to help her form a connection, to just count with him.  Didn't matter what, but I knew that he was so into counting, and could happily do it for hours.  Unfortunately, she totally misunderstood me, and her only comment was "we don't teach maths at preschool".  I was quite dumbfounded, and very disappointed. I am sorry to say that our relationship didn't improve over the year, and I was very glad to get out of her classroom!

I remember one issue we still had was his toileting.  Now he was sort of trained.  He was dry at night, and he generally had complete control of when, where and what he did.  But he would choose not to use the toilet at preschool! It could have been a sensory thing, or something else, but the consequences where that we had many accidents at school.  Every time he had an accident, I would be called to come and clean him up.  I was constantly at the school.  One exasperating day, the teacher turned to me and said "will you just fix your son".  I was extremely hurt by this at the time.  Didn't she think I'd been trying?  Did she think I enjoyed coming up to the school every day just to help him change his pants?

I'm not sure what would have happened at this point, if we hadn't finally managed to get an official diagnosis.  But thankfully, it was around now that we finally got to see a wonderful Speech Therapist who helped us to go to the right people, to get that magic piece of paper.