We took a visit to the school Anya will attend three days a
week. She’ll do her seat work at home on Monday and Tuesday. She is beside
herself about the uniforms. Something about the officiality of it all excites
her to the bones. They have little logos on the shirts and she loves it. She is
still concerned a boy will call her “carrots” and she will break a slate over
his head, but other than that, she can’t wait to start. The only thing is
this…Anya is going back to school and I have to as well. I’ll be with her
until she and the teacher can handle the transition. There are already several
kids in the class that are hard to handle with their lack of focusing ability.
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| First Day of School |
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| Need a picture with big brother and our backpacks. |
Anya arrived at school very excited. The teacher had asked
for information about Anya before she came to school, so I sent a brief bio
about her, her dwarfism and some photos to be forwarded to the families at
school. So, all the kids knew her when she arrived and many of them were
excited to help her.
She shares a table with another girl, we me in a chair at
the end of the table next to her. In true Russian form, she was seen cleaning up
after her table mate. Pencils were put in the shared pencil bucket by cleaning
maniac Anya. Earlier in the day I decided to sharpen all the pencils in the
bucket to prevent her being fixated on an unsharpened pencil later.
We did a math page together and Anya got 100% and a star on
her page in red. You would have thought the president had awarded her a medal.
Her table mate is getting over the flu that is going around
and has a wicked cough. She was coughing and Anya looked sternly at me, used
her head to point over to the girl and said in anger, “She’s gonna get me
sick!” She already had this illness and doesn’t understand antibodies…that
lesson is for another day.
At recess, Anya had a group of four to five girls following
her around and she had them formed up in a kind of game of hockey at one point.
Luckily there are three recesses each day, PE on Thursdays and playtime before
and after school. She's been rolling in the grass and throwing the sand all over her body. I didn’t think she’d be so sweaty after a full day of school,
but she will definitely getting a shower or bath each night before bed. I used
to be able to get away with every other day.
I am the one who has a problem with being back in school.
Anya might too, but she isn’t showing it yet. It is LOUD in a class room with
16 six to eight year olds from 8:30-3:00. I am used to the level of Anya’s
chatter and she didn’t bother me, but all the other fidgeting and noise wasn’t
what my depleted body and mind could handle. Let’s just say that after lunch
there was a Nordquist lying on pillows in the reading center during story time
and it wasn’t Anya…
I am also on phonics/letter overload. It will be perfect for
her, all the repetition and oral work. I just need to learn the sounds to help
her learn them at home. Right now, I listen to the sounds, write them and then
Anya copies what I wrote.
She only needed to hug me three times during the first day and
only lost her ability to cope the last 10 minutes of the day. I did stop her
from taking a girl’s long hair and from trying to stuff it through a punched
hole in a card and from knocking over the teacher’s water bottle several times.
I also had to hide the drawing of a girl she made (I heard giggling and she
pointed to the two circles on the chest of the girl and said, “Look! She had
breasts!”) On a lighter note, I was invited to a 7 year old boy’s birthday this
weekend. He also asked me, “So. Why did you decide to adopt Anya?”
The day ended with Anya winning a small prize during “magic
trash”. If you clean up an item the teacher has chosen ahead of time, you get a
prize. She wasn’t happy on day two when she didn’t
get a prize.
Day two-we are facing time issues today. Anya can’t keep up
with her writing and processing all the new things and she’ll just have to let
it go. She did some writing and announced, “I’m doing a beautiful job!” The
teacher and I laughed. I told her that eventually Anya will provide her with a
little comic relief throughout the day. This second day, she also is moving
away from me, trying to make the other kids laugh and is only concerned about
recess. Miss Adaptability stands on the tire of the tether-ball set up to hit
the ball or uses a hockey stick. She cracks me up. During PE in the afternoon,
after about 20 minutes of playing a game, Anya came over to me and lay on the grass
with her arms outstretched. She looked up at me and murmured, “I want In-N-Out.”
So, off to class we went to get her a snack, since in this new life, you can’t
just leave for In-N-Out burgers when your body needs some protein.
After school was a trip. I had been telling people for a month or so is that the
only word Anya doesn’t seem to understand is exhausted. Now, she does. She was sure she was close to death. She
has been sleeping for 12 hours and probably would take more. She tried to go to
bed that night at 6pm, I should have let her!
Day three=melt down. “I am not coming to school anymore.”
This was said with her arms crossed. “Uh, yes you are.” She is fluctuating
today between melt down and cooperating. She is eating up a storm and if I keep
feeding her, she does okay. This new life is depleting her coping ability
pretty quickly. Soon we’ll have four days of rest. Well, if you consider your
mother making you instantly memorize half of the math facts and a huge stack of
phonograms for reading as “rest”, then that’s what we get.
~Monica
