Still here

37 weeks tomorrow. I am, to be honest, barely aware of this, because I am so busy with non-pregnancy-related things.

#1 on the list of Things that Are Taking All My Time and Attention is Iyyar. After months of slowly getting better, things with him lately have, well, tanked. It's not that he's behaving badly exactly. It's that he's behaving strangely and worryingly. He's talking to himself, he spends a lot of time in self-soothing behaviors (lots of waving his arms around as he conducts invisible fight scenes or writes letters in the air), and, predictably, this is not going over so well with the other kids, who do not want to play with him and by not wanting to play with him, stress him out more. And then he comes home from school and you can barely get through to him with anything. This doesn't happen every day, but it happens a lot, and today is February first. The "by Purim he'll be a different kid" we were hoping for when we started seeing so much improvement over the summer is not comng to pass.

After the psych eval of which you have already heard tell, we had a speech eval in Hebrew, which was a disaster, and a speech eval in English, which was great. "If anything he's above average." No language or processing issues evident at all. I'm trying to track down an OT to evaluate him for sensory issues: the one who was recommended to me lives in Ramot and that is just not practical for us. At this point the big question is where he's going to go next year, and it's looking like a kita mikademet, even though that brings its own host of issues with it. I got a call from someone today about the vaadat hasama (placement board) I requested last week. Today Iyyar is being observed by a gan psychologist and I guess we'll go from there.

In the meantime, Avtalyon has also been raising alarm bells and we've started the paperwork to get him into a gan safa. And Barak, who does not do well with not getting All The Attention All The Time, is feeling neglected. At least he's able to tell me this.

It's Wednesday, which is Mr. Bigfoot's David Yellin day, so I'm off to do the pickup rounds. Finally registered at the hospital last week, by the way. Oh, and does anyone have any experience with going to beit hachlama here? I'm thinking that would be a nice quiet place to make a million more phone calls for Iyyar.