To pre-school or not to pre-school?

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Sigh, for the past few days I’ve been going over the reports from Ethan’s developmental evaluations. I’m trying to prepare myself for when we meet with the evaluators and officials from our local school district. I’ve also been doing some research into our options for therapy to help Ethan over come his developmental delays.

I’m not really excited about the option of sending Ethan off to pre-school. Even if he’s involved in a program that caters to the needs of autistic children I can see things getting ugly. Ethan randomly repeats just about everything he hears. Yesterday we were watching the 1953 musical The Bandwagon. Ethan particularly liked the number in the movie called "The Triplets" with three of the actors dressed up as little kids singing about how much they hate being triplets. One of the lines in the number was, " I wish I had a gun, a wittle, wittle gun! Then I’d shoot the other two and then I’d be just one." That was the one line in the number that Ethan chose to repeat while he danced around in front of the TV. Now just imagine the uproar if he randomly repeated that line while he was in school. In an atmosphere where kids get suspended for drawing cartoons of weapons and little kids are disciplined for sexual harassment I would hate to imagine what they might try to do to Ethan if he blurted out the wrong thing at the wrong time.

I’d love to find an option that allows Ethan to interact with lots of other kids without having to worry about school bureaucracy getting in the way. Back to work now.

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