It is day 25. Today we decided to re-introduce dairy, since he has a 4.5 day break from school. From everything I've heard, you generally can tell pretty quickly after you reintroduce something whether it is a problem or not....that once a problem food is out of the body completely, putting it back in even in small amounts usually causes a pretty strong reaction. So at lunch I let Ryan have 8 ounces of chocolate milk (the one thing he's really been missing). It's only been about 3 hours, but so far so good!

I had the mid-trimester conference with his teacher last night. First of all the whole darn scheduling thing pissed me off. I didn't get a form to fill out to request a date/time, so the classroom assistant emailed me and said she's put me down for Monday at 6. I replied it was fine, I'd get the sitter scheduled and rearrange things at home so I could be there. I had it all arranged (which took some doing), showed up at 6:00 and his teacher was cleaning up to leave. She said I was on her schedule for Tuesday, and that she had to be somewhere else in 15 minutes. She wanted me to come in Tuesday morning instead (the next morning), even though I had major errands to run and it was my only 2 hours this week without kids. I said I'd think about it, but when I got home I emailed her and said I'd be there at the 6:00 time she had me down for originally. The next morning she emailed back and said sorry, she'd given that time slot away already, could I come even later? Ugh. Why she could have stayed for 10 more minutes on Monday night, I'll never know. I went to a lot of trouble to get things set up for the time they gave me.

Anyway, academically he is fabulous. Knows all 70 sight words without hesitation (and we've never even practiced them, let alone made the flash cards they sent home each week!). Knows all of the beginning/middle/end sounds and can write the letters for them (although was marked off on a couple for making the letters backwards). Was perfect on the phonemic awareness, substituting letters to make other words out loud. Is accurate on counting syllables. Counts by 2's and 5's and 10's; can recognize and write all of his numbers (though the 7's are often backwards) up to 100. Can tell time, copies sentences from the board, forms his own sentences. Is reading easily in the highest level books each week. So he's doing very well.

Behaviorally he has improved since the beginning of the year. He still has real problems with personal space issues. We're working on that by trying to have him envision a "bubble" around everyone, and he needs to have permission to enter someone else's bubble.