Gavin Goes to School!

What a change to our daily life! 

Over the coarse of 2 months we've been doing evaluations with the Santa Rosa Florida School District to see if Gavin would qualify to be one of their preschool students. After 4 evaluations with various specialists he was invited to be a student at Bagdad Elementary School and attend FULL TIME PRESCHOOL! His acceptance was based on his speech and language delay. While this is very exciting for a little boy, it's also a little scary as a 3 year old who's never attended daycare. For mom too! We were notified that he was approved to attend Thursday, April 27th and they requested that he start classes that next Monday, May 3rd. They did however offer us the option to wait and start him with the new school year August 23rd. With Laney's soon arrival we thought it might be good to give him an activity of his own and we decided to let him finish off the last 6 weeks of this year. 

School starts at 7:30 am and goes until 2 pm! During the day they have a packed schedule which includes Breakfast, music, P.E., crafts, Lunch, Playground, Nap, art, all academics, etc... Gavin has a male teacher, Mr. McDonal, and his female assistant (whom Mommy can't remember her name because she was trying to not bawl while being introduced). They also help work on potty training...which is great because they have Gavin for more awake hours than we do! This last weekend he started peeing in the potty at home with minimal effort! So far this week we've only had wet night time diapers. Amazing what a difference a month makes! 

In order to get to school for the 7:30 start time, Gavin gets on the bus at 6:10 am!!!!! And the bus returns him home at 2:36 pm. First one on and last one off! While we probably won't send him on the bus both ways every day, but we'd like him to be comfortable with it. In the future it might make more sense to let him sleep the extra half hour and have one of us drop him off at school. It's only 3 miles away.

While in school Gavin will also be meeting with the speech & language specialist for 90 minutes "one on one" per week. We've put his private therapy sessions on hold until school is out for the summer. Then we'll be returning to our twice weekly sessions with Ms. Katie. Also, he's eating school breakfast and lunch. A big thing if you have ever watched him eat! I'm not sure how much of those meals he's eating, but hopefully this will expose him to new foods and seeing other kids his age eat them.

Photos are still to come, it's still quite dark at 6:10 am! And so far there have been lots of tears at departure and arrival!