June Break

Well, on Father's Day, we picked up our son for his two week June break from school.  Since he is on an extended school year program, he gets a couple weeks off in June and a couple weeks off in August unlike a lot of kids who get the full three months off during the summer.  With his special needs he really needs the year round schedule so that he retains what he learned during the year.

We already had a busy two weeks planned for him while he was going to be home from school.  I have mentioned before how much our family enjoys going to Bowie Baysox minor league baseball games.  Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately for my wallet, the Baysox are only in town for four games during the entire 17 days he is home from school. 

I will be taking off this Friday and Saturday night from my pizza delivery gig in order to go to all three games this weekend.  Friday and Saturday nights games will all feature a post game fireworks show.  The Baysox always have a top notch fireworks show.  On Sunday, it will be a meet the team day, and the team has arranged for my son to throw out a ceremonial first pitch prior to the game.  He is pretty stoked about it.  Finally, we will also be attending the Baysox July 4th game for more fireworks before break ends.

The other day, we were going through a bunch of the papers that were sent home with our son.  One pile of papers was all the work he had done in class since his last break.  There were also a few awards.  He won Student of the Week honors just before the break.  He also won an award for "technical achievement" for his computer typing skills.  The Aquatics Department of the school gave him a certificate for being the most improved swimmer in his class.  Awesome work.

Then there were all of the other fun things in another packet that we have to get done before he goes back to school.  There is the list of supplies and clothes that need to be bought and brought to school after the break.  It has been a while since his last haircut, and he is getting rather shaggy.  He needs to get another physical from our family doctor.  While the haircut and physical are hard to get his cooperation on, we usually can get those accomplished.

However, the last thing that we need to get done will be the most difficult, a dental exam.  We had to try to get one before he started the school in November.  We got him into the office, where he promptly dropped to the ground and refused to get up.  He eventually got into the dentist chair and they were able to do a visual exam, however, we were not able to do a cleaning or x-rays.  So that one will be a real adventure.

Since he has been home, I have lost control of the television in the evening, I am using my computer to download and burn CDs and DVDs for him, and I am spending a lot of time with him sitting next to me playing Panda Pai Gow Poker on Pogo.com.  He loves it when we lose hand or guess wrong when trying to predict whether the hand is a win, lose, or push.  It is nice to have my time to myself when he is at school, but while he is home, I wouldn't have it any other way.