Jon’s return to school this year has been great. He has the same teacher this year as last–Tami, the first teacher to really click with him and see his potential. So, there is no transition to speak of, and no burden of trying to communicate all the subtleties of Jon’s situation to a new person with his or her own plans for teaching. Jon hit the ground running, back to all of the computer work and reading exercises that he left in June (in fact, we worked on reading and typing in the summer). So he’s very happy.

On Thursday, his bus arrived and I got on the bus to greet him and assist the driver as she unstrapped his wheelchair. Jon greeted me with a long list of what he did at school today–a paragraph where he’d never given me more than a sentence before. Wow. He was really communicative. Clearly, he was on top of his game.

So we got him inside and we got him a snack. We discovered that we still had some Doritos (pretty much his favourite junk food) from last week’s party and gave him a small bowl.

Since he was so on the ball, I tried something I do from time to time: weasel in a little extra reading time. The TV was on, Jon had a mouthful of chips and I suddenly produced the large-type booklet I print up of his school reading program. The title page reads “I find a baby monster“. Jon, mouth full of chips, studied it with full concentration, scanning it carefully. Then, he read to me: “I…am…eating…nachos!”

I fell over laughing. Jon went back to relaxing. Message received, loud and clear.