Maria’s Grandpa and Grandma Ida came for a visit from Albuquerque this past weekend. We mostly sat around and ate. Saturday evening we went to the new aquarium, which was pretty cool. It would have been much cooler had we not recently gone to the Omaha Zoo, which is totally awesome… Here they have a penguin display with about 10 penguins. Cute. In Omaha, they have about 50 penguins, several different species. Here they had a column of water with about 6 flat silvery fish in it. In Omaha, they had about 200 in the same size column.
The coolest thing at our aquarium was the manta ray petting pond. It’s a large pool with a couple species of baby rays swimming around in circles. They were very friendly! Once or twice a ray came up to Maria and head-butted her hand and Maria actually squealed! So cute. They also had a petting pond with horseshoe crabs and starfish, but she wasn’t as interested in that.
We ate at the Cheesecake Factory, where I had some super delicious chocolate coconut cheesecake–probably the best cheesecake I’ve ever had. As usual, Maria and her grandpa got along great.
We’re still working on getting Maria’s communication device set up. It’s a pain because I have to learn new software, print the symbols on special paper, laminate it, cut it. The home speech therapist made some for us, but they’re black and white, and the school speech therapist wants them in color; and there’s disagreement about the placement of the pictures, and on and on and on. So we’re going to meet at the school Friday to get it worked out (great, right in time for school to be over).
Speaking of school, I wanted to visit the kindergarten classrooms at the school Maria will be going to next year. The intervention specialist was supposed to call me weeks ago, but hasn’t. I finally remembered to call this week and the front desk person put me through to the principal’s voicemail. She didn’t call me back. I called her again Tuesday, no call back. I was too busy today to call, still no call back. There’s only 5 days of school left. Kinda irks me!
Today I went to a training at Raising Special Kids on organizing your child’s records. I was the only student, so got lots of attention. Good thing I brought Maria’s records even though they didn’t tell me to. We spent time in class putting the papers in a notebook, so the class would have been very short had I not thrown them in the car. She focused on school documents and I only brought medical docs, but we still got a lot done. I’m not going to do it exactly as she suggested, but at least it’s a good start.
Tomorrow’s Maria’s graduation ceremony. Gulp. If I concentrate on taking pictures, maybe I won’t cry….
Speaking of the pig flu, I just had a cold that appears to have turned into allergies. Been here 7 years and now I’m getting allergies?