In Which Our Gerbil Takes A Turn For The Worse, And Connor Gets A Progress Report

Our poor little gerbil Teke is sick.  Evidently the stress of going without water for several days, combined with the stress of moving from the pet store here, has made him ill.  We thought he was fine-- he seemed to rally yesterday and the day before, but he started going downhill this morning and by this evening he was spending all his time huddled up in his little nest, refusing to eat or drink anything and squeezing his little eyes half-shut.  If he holds on 'till tomorrow I'll take him into the veterinarian's office, but I'm not highly optimistic.  Poor little guy-- I feel horrible about it. 

I hope he makes it.

Connor's teacher and aide did a home visit today to give us Connor's school progress report and talk a little about what they've been seeing him do at school.  He hasn't made a whole lot of headway towards his IEP goals, but I'm not really surprised by that.  It's not that the school is doing anything wrong-- just the opposite, in fact, as we are extremely happy with the program and teacher and think it's been really good for him-- but he's still so easily distracted by the other kids, noises, etc. that he doesn't demonstrate the things we see from him at home. 

We've been seeing a lot of progress here at the house, and I think that's directly related to school: that he's "processing" the things he sees in the morning later at home in his safe, quiet environment.  While I wish that he'd show them more of what he's capable of, and if we put him in a one-on-one environment he probably would, I think that the peer interaction and the pushing of his boundaries is more important right now, quite frankly.  He's never going to figure out how to interact with the world if he doesn't get that exposure, and since he's an only child right now and we have a relatively quiet house, he certainly not going to get that exposure at home. 

But while it's slow, he has made a little bit of progress at school, which is great!  We're very proud of every step he takes-- no matter how small-- towards being independent.  I'm really hoping that we'll be able to stick with the same teacher and program for next year-- we'll just have to see!

~Jess