It's one of those days. For the past two days my special needs child had been dragging her feet to school. Well, she's perfectly normal while we're getting ready at home - washing and dressing up, taking breakfast, jumping into the car, etc. But the moment we reach the school she would be reluctant to get out of the car. Somehow, for the last two days I had been able to drag her out and bring her to class. If we're on time we'll catch her class at the cafeteria having breakfast, if not, I'll have to climb two flights of steps up to the second floor to her classroom with her and sign her in at the school office there. Yesterday the school staff were somehow able to persuade her to finally go upstairs when breakfast time was over at the first floor. But it was a lot of persuasion. But once she's in class, according to the staff, she's been "good", i.e., she does her school work, unlike in the past when she would be pretending (?) to be sleepy and put her head down unto the desk to sleep. I have problems getting free parking in front of my daughter's school and about two weeks ago I finally got ticketed for illegally parking in front of her school, where there's a no-parking-no-standing sign, while bringing her in. It takes only 8-10 min., if a teacher doesn't talk to me about something. But in that 8-10 min. I got a parking violation ticket! I have challenged the ticket online, citing inadequate access for handicapped people to this school building, but it would be a matter of time for me to find out whether they would dismiss my case or not. Meanwhile, I have to pay it ($115) before it accrues penalty charges at a rate of $10 a month! In the mean time, I talked with a social worker from my daughter's healthcare provider, and I found out that I can apply for a "blue tag" which should enable me to park at the curb of a road and have access to disabled parking in commercial buildings. This one will take a long time as the basic requirement is for my daughter to have a non-driver photo ID before we can apply for it. That will be the first step I will have to make and today I just Googled how to do it.
Going back to today, I couldn't find free parking so, we had to park in a paid parking space along the main road nearest to her school, a good one block away from the gate of her school. So, I paid for 30-minute parking and displayed the ticket on the driver's side of the windshield, as required. Then my daughter wouldn't get out from the car. I thought, here we go again. Well, I finally got her out of the car with much persuasion, encouragement, promises of some "delicious" temptations, even threats of "reporting" her behavior to her dad, etc. So, we walked through the long block of houses, carefully evading the ice on the sides of the path (traces of Blizzard Nemo left in New York), and then we were almost at the road in front of her school and we could see the big gate and the big, grey building of her school. Then she stopped walking. She just couldn't be persuaded to keep walking. I thought, it's still a long way inside and at the rate we're walking we'll miss her class at the cafeteria, I'll end up walking all the way up to her classroom with her. With the amount of dragging I had to do the day before, I thought, oh, forget it. Let's just go home. I'm not gonna do this every day. This isn't really the first time she's missing school, but this is the first time she got so near to any school and we still have to turn back home. It doesn't help to think that we had to drop her older brother to school also today, because it had been so cold the past few days. He usually takes the public bus. But because I gave him a lift one extremely cold day before Nemo struck, we all realized it's not that difficult to send him as well, it only takes 7 extra minutes, and he wouldn't have to walk through the chilling winds and stand in the cold waiting for the bus. Because of that I actually studied the map so I could find another route that evades all the traffic lights we have to pass through going from his school to my daughter's school. I had tried it yesterday and it worked, so, today I was confident I'll do good time again, and we did, it's just that, it's like driving through a maze going through those residential roads and having to stop at stop signs at almost every junction. Well, at least, there's no traffic jam and we had to cross only three traffic lights instead of an endless series of them! Her school starts at 9am and we were at the parking at 8:47. Not bad, we had plenty of time to walk to her school IF I could make her walk through the gates and the hallways when we reached it! Oh well, today, we went to the playground instead. :)
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