A Look Back At Kai's First Semester of High School, and New Year's Mochi

This time of year is a great time to reflect back while also looking ahead.

2018 was a significant year for Kai as he graduated from middle school and began high school. After eight and a half years at a therapeutic school, his return to a regular school for high school has been mostly successful. He seems to be doing well in his classes - it looks like he will earn A's in English, reading, science, and history plus a B in algebra for his first semester. Though his classes are considered to be "fundamentals" and seem to be very basic. We worry that these classes won't offer him the opportunity to attend college, but that will be a discussion we need to have with his school.

Besides grades, though, our biggest concern going in was whether or not Kai would be able to handle the environment of a much larger school. In that regard, his transition has been relatively successful. His classes are all within a self-contained special ed program so he is getting a lot of support. While Kai is making gains in many areas, he still struggles when his environment becomes ambiguous and unpredictable. He especially struggles with socialization, preferring to exercise control over things and not wanting to have direct collaboration with peers. We were hoping that attending a regular school would expose him to more socialization opportunities but he has little desire to socialize with others, and while we encouraged him to join extracurricular clubs to expand his high school experiences, the few he tried haven't gone particularly well.

The best 'extra' experiences have been those we enjoyed together with him, such as at a couple of his school's football games.

Kai's cousins are part of the marching band and Kai enjoyed seeing them in the halftime performances.

Most kids go to the games with their friends, not their parents. Not sure if that is something that Kai will want to do in the coming few years.

I have a feeling that in terms of socialization, progress will be slower than we had hoped. But as Kai goes into his second semester of high school, let's see if can be more comfortable in ambiguous situations.

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A Japanese tradition is to make mochi for New Year's. As Santa brought us a mochi maker this Christmas, we made our mochi for the first time.

My wife used the mochi machine to cook the sweet rice and then knead and pound it. (In the old days, pounding the rice was a manual process and part of the ritual of making mochi.) My wife took the mochi out of the machine.

She then showed me and Kai how to shape the mochi into individual pieces.

And then it was our turn to try.

With our own machine, we can make mochi whenever we want to and don't have to make too much at one time.

We had some for lunch today and will have more tomorrow with our ozoni, the Japanese soup containing mochi rice cakes that is part of the Japanese New Year tradition.

Happy New Year!

First Week of High School

Kai finished up his first full week of high school, and I don't have too much to report.

And that is a good thing.

It has been nine years since Kai started kindergarten. Back then we were excited that he would be attending our neighborhood school, but also very anxious about how he would do there. It wasn't long before daily incident reports started to pile up, and he ended up transferring to a public therapeutic school a few months later where has been since.

Now he is back with typical kids, starting his freshman year at our community's high school.

I'm happy to say that it has been an uneventful week.

Every day we ask Kai how the day went, and he gives us a one word answer of "okay" or "good." When we probe, we are sometimes able to get him to talk about what he had for lunch (he likes buying school lunches) or a sentence or two on a couple of his classes.

But what we're most happy about is what he isn't saying.

He hasn't "fired" any of the staff yet. He isn't complaining about how annoying the other students are.

And for a kid who used to go to a middle school with far less than a hundred students and is now attending a high school with more than a couple thousand, that is something.

There's no question that as his first week wrapped up, he seemed much happier than he has been at school in the past few years.

Of course it is still early. He is in the honeymoon period of a new school. There has always been issues that come up, and we don't expect that to magically change now.

But it is nice that Kai got off to a good start.

It gives us hope regarding high school.

Cubs Game and Starting High School

We had one last summer outing this week as we went to our first Cubs game at Wrigley Field as a family.

It took a while to get over the jet lag after returning from Japan, but we were in good spirits on this afternoon. Kai's constant anxiety with getting sick has finally ended. He did get a very minor cold - certainly nothing worth all the stress he had - and it didn't stop him from enjoying the free time he had the past week and a half.

The first thing we did when we got home from Japan was to schedule appointments with a doctor and a therapist to discuss his anxiety. His medication was increased and there was a lot of discussion with him over all the stress he had (and caused). Not sure how much all of that had to do with his calming down versus just being home and back in his comfortable surroundings, but we're all feeling better now.

Kai and I went to a Cubs game last fall, but that was in Milwaukee when the Cubs played the Brewers. I wanted to take everyone to see a game at Wrigley, and had bought tickets way back in February.

In the days leading up to the ballgame, it looked like it might rain on game day, but we lucked out as there was no rain all day. It was actually a very nice day. At one point when the sun came out, Kai started to complain about it being too hot and said that it was like being back in Japan. We told him that this was nothing like Japan as the temperature was more than 20 degrees cooler.

The other thing that was very different than Japan is that the food selection at the ballpark was all non-healthy, traditional ballpark fare. We all had footlong Chicago hot dogs. I enjoyed it but my wife said later that she felt ill from eating it.

But the ball game was great. The Cubs scored a lot and won 8-4 over their rival Brewers. Kai was very happy!

He said it was the best baseball game he's ever been to. I don't know about that as we have been to several really entertaining games, but I was glad that he had fun, as did we all.

The other big event this week was that Kai started high school. He went for about on hour on Tuesday for Freshman Prep Day, getting his id photo taken, buying his gym shirt and shorts, and doing other administrative things. And then he had his first day of classes on Friday. Actually it was only a half day, and there wasn't much teaching or studying, but he was in the classroom.

So it was an easy day, and happily there were no incidences.

We have told Kai that this is a fresh start for him, and a great opportunity for him to make a good first impression so he should be friendly to other students and to staff. It frustrates me that he doesn't seem to understand.

But anyway, we're off! So far so good, but we'll keep our seatbelts fastened as turbulence can arise without notice. :)

High School Decision

Kai has been attending a public therapeutic school since the middle of his kindergarten year... that is about eight and a half years.

For the last several months, as the end of his middle school days drew nearer, we have been stressing out about where Kai will attend high school.

There is no doubt that Kai has come a long way at his therapeutic school, but it has also been hard to see other kids come and go, returning to their home school while Kai hasn't made enough progress to be considered for a transition. In the last few years, Kai's attitude about school, and himself, has gotten increasingly negative. He hated school, and thought less of himself. He seemed to give up on thinking that he could be anything more than a problem child.

It made us wonder if a change in scenery and a fresh start at a new school would do him good. With the transition to high school coming in the fall, the timing seemed right for a change to a regular school, albeit by spending the majority of time in a special ed classroom.

But it wasn't a decision that we could make on our own; our community's high school would have to agree to accept Kai.

And so we had a series of meetings and emails to discuss the matter. The high school expressed concern about being able to support Kai. But we were heartened that all parties involved, including the special ed representatives of our local high school as well as the staff from Kai's current school were able to be open-minded and were sincerely interested in determining what would be best for Kai.

There was talk about splitting time between the regular school and therapeutic school, or perhaps waiting to transition to the regular high school for another year, but in the end we were very pleased that the decision was made for Kai to attend our local high school full time beginning in the fall.

After eight and a half years, it is a big milestone for us and we are very pleased. My wife was in tears after the last meeting with the school officials where the decision was officially made.

Of course, we were also happy nine years ago when Kai started kindergarten at our neighborhood school. The following photo is from his first day of kindergarten.

That ended up being an extremely stressful time as we got reports from school every day about the difficulties that Kai had before the decision eventually was made to send him to the therapeutic school he's been at ever since.

This time we're going in fully aware that the transition won't be easy. Our community's high school is very large and the hallways are crowded and bustling. We don't know for sure what will happen when he goes there.

But we also think that he is much further along in being able to cope with the challenges he will face. He doesn't have nearly as many meltdowns as before, and he is much more reflective and self-aware than he used to be. And so we do think that he has a realistic chance to succeed, and that this change is just what he needs.

In four months, when Kai starts high school, our stress will start up again. But that is for another day. Today we mark a big milestone with a sigh of relief and joy in our hearts.