We’ve almost reached the end of another school year. Term ends on Friday for my sons, but this year along with the approach of six weeks without school runs and mostly without alarm clocks, we also have to say some goodbyes. My boys are moving schools in September which is thrilling and exciting on many levels. They no longer need the intensive support of the speech and language resource at their current school (number one son actually left the resource last year) and have made tremendous progress through sheer hard work. I’m very much looking forward to a school run of only one mile instead of 8.5, which goes nowhere near a main road, let alone a motorway. However, the flipside is that they (and we) will be saying goodbye to most of the wonderful people who have helped them make this progress. The effort that the boys have put in has been matched by the teachers, TAs and SLTs who go above and beyond their job descriptions on a daily basis and I have been lucky enough to get to know some of them quite well over the past four years.
These are people who know my sons well enough to choose perfect leaving presents for them. Star Wars Lego for L last year and a Sonic the Hedgehog pencil case filled with Sonic pens and pencils for C today.
These are people that my boys want to hug and who not only tolerate this, but laugh about the ensuing chocolate stains on their clothes (and the matching ones on mine).
These are people who encourage and support all the children in the resource and won’t allow any of them to put themselves down.
These are people who allowed my older son to attend the tea party even though he’s not strictly supposed to, because I mentioned that he was disappointed that he was no longer invited and they didn’t want him to miss out on the chance to say goodbye to his friends in the resource.
These are people who are genuinely fond of the children they teach and are almost as proud of them as their parents are.
And all of that is just from today…
Today was the speech and language resource tea party. They hold one at the end of every term which means that my first one was in December ’07 when L was 5 and C was not yet 2. Fast forward to today (and sometimes it feels like we really did zoom through those years) and my last resource tea party. I think I laughed and cried in equal measure this afternoon.
Yesterday I asked C what he thought I should bring for everyone to eat and predictably enough he chose chocolate cake. So this morning I made a couple of dozen chocolate cupcakes.
It’s a good job I took a photo because they disappeared very quickly when the children were let loose on the food. They were the main source of the chocolate stains that my younger son was leaving in his wake. Oops!
I have also made, but haven’t wrapped, the presents for their teachers and C’s SLT (I’ll blog about those in a day or two) and I need to write a host of thank you cards for them all (more tears probably). Then on Friday we’ll be saying our final goodbyes to everyone.
