you'd better do it yourself as far as making sure documents get to their correct destination in the English NHS. Today was positive in many ways: Older Son suddenly discovered that the door to his bedroom was a rectangle, and on our walk to downtown had to point out every rectangle he saw. At one point he said, "Rectangles EVERYWHERE!" It was a great thing to be a part of. I also managed to be on the ball and professional about getting the last bits of information to the Sutton School Admissions to make sure that Older Son was well and truly in as far as the upcoming school year was concerned. I even typed-up a very professional cover letter to go with the information that detailed all enclosed information. ( The reason I am making a big deal out of this is that the longer anyone reads this blog, the more they will know how rarely I am ahead of the curve with getting things done in a timely and professional matter.) Anyhow, I walked downtown with the boys to fax the papers to Sutton and- 2 pounds fifty later- job done. On the way home Older Son was saying goodbye to everything on our walk before we got home: "Goodbye tree, goodbye man, goodbye fence, goodbye car, goodbye bin...." I pointed out things he had missed, and Younger Son got into the act, shouting "Buh-bye-Buh-bye!" over and over. We got a few looks, but I could care less.
As a side note, I learned that I had been exposing my basic ignorance of English geography every time I complained to anyone about how our address says Surrey but we were sending our information about schools to Sutton.....it turns out that we are in the Borough of Sutton. One of my husband's friends pointed it out to me this weekend, and it's there in big letters on the notice we were sent about Older Son's school: Borough of Sutton. I have since learned that we are in Worcester Park, Sutton, Surrey, but its never put on the address like that because the post code covers the fact that we're in Sutton....those of you who are English and reading this post are probably thinking, "Well, duh..." but hopefully this will help the next American mom who may read this. England seems to be filled with different overlapping boroughs and counties, so you have to be careful to find out where exactly information needs to be sent to be effective.
Case in point: my ongoing struggle to get Older Son's NHS speech and language report from Shrewsbury; where it was done, to Kingston; where it needs to be for Older Son to continue getting help and possible speech therapy in Worcester Park. Like I said before about knowing where information needs to be, I would have had no idea that the NHS in Kingston, the next town over, covered children with speech and language difficulties here . This report was done a month ago, and it has yet to get to Kingston, even though I was reassured by the speech therapist that she had sent it to Kingston for me, and even states at the end of my copy of the report that she had sent it there. I had called Kingston's speech and therapy department last week to find out if any search had been done for the missing file, and was told that they had looked but no report for Older Son had been found. At this point I doubt they even bothered to move any papers around, but I'll play the game, and had asked for their fax number to have Shrewsbury send it again. It was just my luck that when I called the Shrewsbury office the speech therapist who had done the report was on holiday and they were moving office. I left a message for her, (see earlier blog about how futile that effort is) and of course have yet to hear back from them. Today I called Kingston, and after getting a message machine from the front desk for two hours, someone finally picked up the phone to send me through to the speech and language department to......wait for it, folks.....another message machine. So, I (sigh) yet again left another message on another machine to ask if maybe I could fax them MY copy of Older Son's speech report to finally get this ball rolling. We're going up to Shrewsbury tomorrow. I'll bring all the paperwork up there in case I finally manage to talk to a person and am certain that the fax wont end up in the circular file (something I learned from my teaching days: the circular file is the trash can).
We're going up to Shrewsbury to have another meeting with Older Son's pediatrician, who will look over the speech and hearing reports, and probably tell me that Older Son has autism, because I swear that's what he decided Older Son had the second I was stupid enough to say that he didn't make eye contact very well as a baby. He then started asking me if Older Son had to have a fixed schedule, if he got extremely upset if things changed, if he had to go to school a certain way every day...on and on, and I felt like screaming, NO. HE DOESN'T HAVE AUTISM. STOP TRYING TO PUT HIS PROBLEMS UNDER A NEAT HEADING AND DO YOUR JOB. But I didn't. I just told him calmly that, no, he doesn't have any trouble with changes, any more than any other child does, and that he adapted remarkably well to moving to another country and living in another house and going to another school. Still, I've had at least three people, one who works in the NHS no less, tell me to expect that title to be slapped on him, and that it may be the only way to get him the help he needs in a timely manner. Do I think that Older Son is Autistic? No. Do I think he has some sensory issues? Probably. But I want him to be assessed by a qualified professional, and it looks like that will take a while here. Well, its better than what was happening in the states: he was going to be in a regular kindergarten classroom this year with only a pull-out group speech therapy group twice a week. I know for a fact that would have done absolutely nothing for him. So, even though things are moving slowly, I need to remind myself that its better than the situation we left. Someone remind me of that fact when I report that I've gone ballistic on some bureaucratic lackey who loses my paperwork again.
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