Three-Sixty

When I was a kid I could ride my purple, banana seat bike, the one with a purple glitter seat, everywhere all year round. I could jump the curb, sprint the two blocks to the park, go around the block to grandma and grandpa`s with no problem. There is one thing that I never mastered on that bike, the three-sixty. One of my brothers could spin himself on his bike in the air to make a complete circle without crashing. I do not know how he did that and I guess I was probably to sense- able a kid for that kind of stuff, but it was cool when he did it.

Now that I am parenting kids who need to live their lives in the "system" all the time I an learning how to do that three-sixty. One minute the plan is to stop everything and get the kid out into the community, ready or not because that is the plan that happens to have the available funding right now. No one has any idea what will be happening next month so we had better get moving.

This is not the way we wanted to do things. We wanted to make a very slow transition from school to community, to work, to living outside the home. We just felt that would be the best way to do things, after all the average teenager in not ready to be on their own the minute they become adults so certainly someone who has significant special needs would not be ready either.

This morning while going through the mail I found a letter from another state which informed me that since my child will turn eighteen after Oct. 1st 2011 and is developmentally disabled new legislation in that state has made it possible for adoption assistance to continue. That is one piece of legislation that is working to benefit the kids. This will allow us to do a three-sixty back to the plan that we felt was right all along, ya-hoo!! I just have to figure out what documents from our state will fulfill their requirements. I do have thousands of pages to choose from and I have to get this to the people who make decisions and control the funds before the kid turns eighteen, this task is not quite as much fun as riding that banana seat bike, but it is one I can take on for the kid.