Holy shit, Tristan is four and a half years old!
What does this mean? Well, he’s signed up for kindergarten. His birthday is right on the edge of eligibility, so he will start the 2013-2014 school year in kindergarten. In our school district, kindergarten is full day! That will be good for Tristan and me both; not sure if Kirianna will miss him too much. It looks like he’ll probably still be in special ed, at least to begin with. He’s damn smart but he honestly has trouble not getting up and running around the room whenever he wants. Hell, he’s smart enough that I will look into supplementary programs just to challenge him intellectually if he still has trouble remaining stimulated.
One thing I’ve noticed lately is that if a class size is VERY small (1-2 people including him) he will respond decently, if a class size is large (20ish people) he will also respond well, but if the class is medium sized, he acts out either for attention or for reasons involving stimulation. In a large class, he doesn’t necessarily act like the model student, but he seems more like a little bit of a punk than the kid who won’t stop running around the room. I will need to bring this up during his next IEP meeting. His class at The Little Gym flared up suddenly from 5 to 20, and he hasn’t had a serious discipline problem since.
Tristan has started mumbling or talking like his mouth is full, or my hearing is going to shit. Maybe both. But he understands a request to repeat himself and/or speak louder; it just doesn’t always help.
Lately he seems to have gained a level in all of the neat things one can do on the playground. He climbs to the top of spider webs and he can sort of slide down firepoles, and he finally figured out the spiral pole thingie.
He’s doing very well with understanding consequences of his actions – well, for a 4 year old. He is starting to understand that if he misbehaves in certain ways, there are certain consequences. “No pbbt on mommy or you lose your puzzles” (yes, he still reverses his pronouns). That doesn’t mean he doesn’t break the rules a lot; he still does, but not as heedlessly as he had been.