Sam is a very likable kid and works hard to please the people he cares about. His teachers really like him and he has tons of friends at school. Because he has such a stellar reputation, I was surprised to find out that Sam bit another child during recess. Sam doesn’t bite. He has been known to lash out when upset, but he’s never bitten anyone. It took this serious event to make me realize Sam was feeling scared about what this move would mean to him. He was feeling out-of-control and just didn’t know how to handle his frustration. I realized I needed to do something to help him regain his sense of composure about future events.

After making sure he understood that biting was unacceptable, I set out to help him visualize the future. I took photos of our new home, the surrounding neighborhood, Claire’s daycare and his new school. I printed out the photos and taped them to our refrigerator at his eye level. We discussed what each photo represented. I often catch him pondering the photos with a bemused expression on his face. I think he’s starting to look forward to the change!

I also printed out a calendar from Outlook and wrote in several major events, i.e. moving day, soccer games, the last day of school, etc. We taped this up next to the photos. Sam still has trouble understanding time concepts such as today, yesterday, tomorrow. This calendar has been VERY helpful in giving him a sense of how far off certain things were, how soon other things would happen, and so on. He crosses off each day that passes and counts the number of days until we move. This seems to be empowering for him. Since this is so successful, we’ll be continuing this even after the move is over.

Life in this partially packed up home isn’t all business, though. We do fun things like decorate cakes for daddy’s birthday:

and snooze on the couch whenever possible:

It’s official. We’ve sold our home. This big change in our lives has given me a lot to mull over. I’m not going to lie and say I never once thought it might be a mistake. There have been moments when I’ve had serious doubts about what we were doing, especially during the two meetings we’ve had with Sam’s teachers about the special services he needs from his school to help him make up for lost time caused by his hearing problems. He’s had THE BEST educators anyone could hope for. To the very end, they were proactive in making sure he got the help he needed. They were concerned for him. They were attentive to his needs. They were sympathetic. They have gone above and beyond the call of duty. I’m profoundly grateful to each and every one of them.

Unfortunately, this move means we have to take him away from this support system and send him off into the unknown…into a completely different school district with completely different enrollment protocols. Seattle has an open enrollment school system, which means kids from all over town can attend whatever school they choose, provided there’s room. Since we submitted our application long after the enrollment deadline, we found that most of the highly rated schools had long waiting lists. We started to worry that we’d have to send him far from home to a less than acceptable school. Moving suddenly seemed like a very dumb idea.

Something good happened, though. We have no idea what took place, but there was an opening in a FANTASTIC school just a mile from our new home. We leapt at the chance and now have Sam signed up for kindergarten at this new school. Had he stayed in the Shoreline schools, he would have moved on to first grade, since he would have received support from people who already knew what he needed. Since he’s starting a new school, with new teachers and new kids, we thought it would be a good idea to give him the extra year to catch up academically and socially. We want him to feel confident in his ability to learn new things rather than feel like he’s always one step behind everyone else. He’s ok with being held back and is actually looking forward to starting at this new school. I’m so impressed with his resiliency!

With the school situation taken care of, we had to start looking around for daycare. That also proved to be a nerve-wracking situation with a happy ending. I called around to 20+ daycares in the area just to find out if they had openings, never mind whether or not they were places which I’d actually feel comfortable leaving my kids. All but two said they had waiting lists over a year long. I took Claire to visit one of them and immediately knew it was the one we wanted. The provider was surprised that I didn’t have more questions to ask her, but my instincts have been honed about such things and I knew a good thing when I saw it. It’s a Montessori program, which will be beneficial to both kids (Sam will go there during Summer vacation). The teacher has over twenty years experience teaching young children and it showed. The kids obviously liked her a lot. I could barely tear Claire out of there at the end of our visit.

With that, our two biggest concerns were resolved and we could turn our full attention to getting ready to move to a new house. Both of us are a bit disappointed that we didn’t find a home to buy during the short period we had to look around (nothing really struck our fancy), but we feel pretty good about the rental we located in a good neighborhood. We’ll start looking around for our dream home in a year or so. Hopefully, the housing market will soften somewhat in that time!

Anyway, we’ll have the keys to the new home on the 26th and will start moving some boxes over there during the evenings. We’ve got some friends lined up to help us move the heavy stuff on the following weekend. I can hardly wait to get settled in. This has been a trying couple of months!