Many journeys I have taken, many lessons I have learned with each milestone my daughter has reached. When Katie was young I scoured every SPED type article I could find. Read every word and advertisement in “EXCEPTIONAL PARENT”. I learned early on that when introducing a new task or activity one should discuss it, model it and practice it. Unfortunately I am too lazy to implement each of those steps and spent most of our time, “winging it” and hoping for the best. For you to better understand my version of “winging it” you need to know that for me it meant: getting an idea, grousing to myself “How on earth could she actually do that?”, stewing over it, procrastinating on moving forward with the idea, sharing my thoughts with anyone who couldn’t run fast enough to escape hearing my litany, taking advice from the wonderful fans of Katie, presenting the idea to her, talking about every single aspect of what to do/what not do and how to react in case things go awry, then tossing her into the situation, hoping things would go well. In the meantime I would be pacing the floor with a phone glued to my ear telling everyone what was happening, then being totally surprised and happy that it all went well.
Last summer was no exception to my laziness rule. Summer water exercise class hours happened to fall on two of the days that I was working at Black Hawk Area Ed Center, not far from Black Hawk College. I thought that an excellent way to sneak extra exercise in would be for Katie to walk from the Center to the College and go to the water ex. class. Then I could pick her up when I finished work for the day. This would be her first foray going for a walk alone to get somewhere (other than walking to or from my parent’s). You must be thinking, “she has ridden that route hundreds of times, of course she will know the way.” That would be true for most people, but when one falls asleep the moment one’s bum touches the tuck and roll upholstery, whatever is passing by the windows is non-existent to the sleeper.
After getting the idea and grousing, stewing, procrastinating, and all of my other winging it phases, I sent her out the front door of the school once I had adjusted the straps of her backpack laden with swim gear. Immediately I had to share my angst with the first person I saw. Her first response was, “I can drive her there, do you want me to stop her and drive her there?”. I told her that I wanted Katie to continue, I just hoped she would make it there and remember to call me when she arrived. Bless her heart, this woman then offered to follow her and spy on her to make sure all was well! You have heard me say this before, but, people are so good!
We evaluated the areas that I thought would be problematic.
1. turning the correct direction out of the parking lot.
2. pressing the correct “walk” button on the stop light at the busy intersection.
ays daydream, plus I decided….we decided that the experience outweighed the possibility of a vendo-gorge.