gifts

I feel like I have about 150,000 blog posts in the works and am stuck on all of them. Ahh good intentions. So, with little hoopla I'm just going to jump in.

I've been doing a lot of sketching of wild flowers lately, and when I was thinking about what to make for my son's preschool teachers for the year end thank you-s, I started sketching on note cards and envelopes. I did a set of seven for both teachers.

They seemed to really like them and I'm very glad because those two women changed my son's life forever.

My son goes to a speech and language preschool that specializes in helping kids deal with and improve their speech issues. One student is a child of a deaf mother and needed help learning to speak since he doesn't hear it at home. A couple of girls in the class have parent's who primarily speak a language other than English and needed help learning to correctly articulate English. My son, and a very good friend, have a speech delay, meaning that something in their development caused them to start talking late.

For my son the delay was entirely a motor issue (his mouth is not very coordinated) and not a cognitive one, but having any kind of delay can adversely effect other areas of development. He'd been in private speech therapy for a year when we found this school. He was making great progress but he was still not talking to people in the community, which I just knew in my bones was wrong because there is nothing my boy loves more than people. Six weeks in, he started having short conversations with baristas and such. A year later, he is almost completely caught up to his peers. He is confident, chatty with strangers (and seriously never stops talking to me!! He wants to know how everything works, why it works, and how I know how it works. He's such a brite little guy) and fully looking forward to Kindergarten starting in the fall.

He has a month left of "summer camp" at his preschool and somehow I have to find a way to tell these women what an amazing thing they did. I always knew he had ideas and questions bursting from his imagination. I knew he wanted to participate in the world, to be at the center or the sidelines or wherever he could be to be part of it all. I knew he was brimming with compassion and friendliness but had no way to show it. They, and his incredable speech therapist, showed him how.

They gave my child the world, and the world, my child.

How do you thank someone for that?