Cog in the Machine

I was home today because our otherwise fabulous day care provider believed our little princess to be harboring new pathogen and put her in a 24 hour time out.  And the downside to having a month of vacation time and a husband with a new job without any, is that you get to handle Sick Days.  Even if you were already scheduled to handle the pre-op eye visit and the phlebotomist party next week AND you are suppose to be taking a week off the week after that. 

Let's just say I believe their assumptions were, while possibly well-intentioned, entirely without basis in fact.  Defendant's evidence to be supplemented at later date (because the photo uploader is taking too long and it's 1am).  As I noted to someone in a brief email, too sick for them, not sick enough to nap the day away and let mommy work from home.  Which means the only rest I will be securing on Sunday is rest from my maternal duties because I WILL BE AT THE OFFICE.  Grr. 

But the day started off with a quick meeting at the school district to go over their notes from the Transitional Meeting and, as far as I could tell, just set testing dates.  The quiet voice in my head wondered if this were maybe not the most efficient use of time ever, but there were forms to sign and, as a neophyte to the mysterious IEP, I'm all about face time.  Which -genius- is probably why they do this. 

I still find the fact that Down Syndrome is not an automatic qualifier in our great state to be mind-boggling (though, weirdly, good?  Is anything automatic?  I should look into this), but I'm a cog in a bureaucratic machine myself so get that there are (occasionally) Reasons For Things. 

Also, I finally reached the nice lady who hit on my husband who works at my girl's daycare.  LOVE HER.  I didn't ask if I could post her family's life story on my blog, even if no one reads it, so will reluctantly opt for discretion, but before her daughter entered school in our town, they did NOT mainstream our kids.  Guaranteed education, yes, inclusion no.  She changed that.  She was also funny and practical and LOVED HER.  But we were also on the phone a long time and the local savages were up waaayyy past their bedtime so I ended up getting off the phone in a hurry.  I want to call back and ask if she'll be my new BFF but I'm not 13 anymore -

And yes, contrary to yesterday's post, I realize that it did not take me long to warm up to her but anyone who tells you they took all their kid's teachers to inclusion conferences and can discuss the finer points of adaptive lessons has already earned a gold stamp.  But, because my life is dripping with irony, the only two outcomes here will be we'll have a string of successful coffee dates only to discover I really don't  like her after all because she hates dogs or something, or she was just being nice and this was her standard advocate-mom call for other moms of special kids and even though I'm all smushy for her, she's going to think I'm crazy-stalker lady when I ask her out on mom-date #4.  Being a grown up is hard.