Hug Twice

Before I had children I had a lot of idealized versions of how things would be in my head. I was going to do a lot of things, and one of those things was homeschool my kids. Once I had kids, I wasn’t completely sure if that was what I was going to do, but I was still leaning strongly in that direction.

But then CJ, my oldest, moved from baby to toddler, and he wasn’t talking as much as he should. In fact, he *really* wasn’t talking as much as he should, but we didn’t realize it was as big a deal as it was. He’s a boy, people would say, boys are slower to talk. Besides, he walked soooo early and he could practically run at 10 months - of course something else would take longer. And I believed that, and we kept encouraging him to talk and trying to get him to communicate, but we had no idea what we were doing. We’re not speech therapists, after all.

So when CJ turned 2, I decided to branch out into semi-organized education, of a sort, and enrolled him in a once a week Parents Day Out program for two hours a week to give him a chance to talk to other kids. And it seemed to help a little, but he still wasn’t really talking. At 3, we switched him to a new pediatrician, and that doctor had us take him for language testing, and that is when we learned CJ has a very significant speech delay.

We first enrolled him in twice weekly speech therapy classes but that wasn’t enough, so he now goes to a 5 day a week (half day) program through the public school system. And unlike all of our efforts to get him to talk more - this is working. His speech is developing by leaps and bounds and he is still significantly behind, but I can almost see him catching up to other kids his age every day.

In some ways, this has been an okay process for me. He loves school, just adores it, so that makes it easier. The hardest part was realizing that my son needed help that I just couldn’t give him myself. I’ve long held this idea that I could learn whatever I needed to and do whatever necessary to educate my children. But in this case, I honestly could not. We’ve learned lots of ways to help him communicate now, but I still don’t make progress with him as well as his speech therapists do.

So now, I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ll change course and homeschool when it comes time for kindergarten (he is 3 right now) or if that will even be a feasible option for him, and I don’t know how I’d feel about homeschooling my daughter (who is 1) but not my son. For now, he still needs more help than I can give him. And that has been a hard realization to accept.

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