Preschool Snow Day
So Jonah. I think I’ve mentioned him around here before?
Originally, I had been planning to keep Jonah home this year and send him to preschool next year where his brother, his sister, and his other sister all went. That little preschool at the church down the hill has been pretty much the only thing these siblings have had in common- well, that and their parents. Which, you know, is a good thing too. And were each brought home from the hospital in the gray Subaru Forester. And that’s about it. They were born in four different hospitals in two different states, each delivered by a different doctor, and were each brought home to whatever home we were living in at the time.
So this little preschool held some extra sentimental value for me in that way where they could yell out, “Hey! There’s my preschool!” every time we drove by it and they could each yell out the same thing about the same school. And I could answer, “Yes, all of you went to that school for preschool” feeling all good about providing them stability and continuity in their early growing up years. At least when it came to preschool.
But then Jonah. Last year, it started becoming more and more apparent that his speech wasn’t coming along at the same rate as his siblings’ did. He was pretty hard to understand, even for me, the mama. At first, we shrugged it off. He’s number four after all and has many older siblings only too happy to help interpret or speak for him. Then last spring at his three year checkup, the doctor raised up our level of concern by several notches. She felt it was a little more concerning because by age three, he really should have been speaking in more than two or three word sentences. That pronouncement brought on a flurry of visits to the hearing center, the audiologist, the language pathologist, and the final conclusion being that Jonah has a speech delay. Which then brought on the realization that Jonah would likely need to receive speech therapy. At a public school. Not at the little preschool at the church down the hill where his siblings went.
Sadness. (For me.)
So we got his IEP in place which gets him three thirty-minute speech sessions a week and decided to just send him to the preschool where the speech therapy is provided in a two birds, one stone kind of way. And in the fall, off he went to his very own little preschool where nobody knew his family, nobody knew his name, and he couldn’t even say it clearly enough for anybody there to understand him.
His mommy and daddy were a little worried and sad for him at the beginning of the school year.
Turns out, we needn’t have worried. Most importantly because God was with him. And also because God made Jonah to be exactly the boy he is. He blazed his own trail in there, made a name for himself, and never looked back. I mean it. Not even once. He marched in there, put his face close to a new face to make eye contact, and motioned with two toys to come and play together. One for you and one for me. He didn’t need words to make lots of new friends all by himself. I know this because on more than one occasion, one of the other moms in the class would come up to me later and ask if my son was Jonah and how her little boy loved Jonah and talked about him all the time. And I would smile, feeling so grateful, and all the while wish fervently that Jonah would have dropped a few names so I would have at least a small chance of returning the favor of knowing her son’s name too.
All this to say he loves having his very own school to go to.
And a nice perk of being at a new preschool?
And every time we drive on the road that he knows so well but the others don’t? He calls out, “Hey! There’s my preschool!” And as it turns out, the stability and continuity were there all along.
