Today we had to go in for a meet the teacher meeting. It wasn’t really the first time we met of course. We met her at orientation, and I spent a couple of hours with her when I volunteered a month and a half ago (and I can’t wait to do it again, by the way). However, it’s just about end of term, report cards are coming, and so the teacher just wanted to meet with each kid’s parent(s) to keep things up to date.

As we expected, everything is going well with Hayley. She’s doing much better than she was at the beginning of the year because she’s not upset and worried now. She looks forward to school, and actually this morning she ran at full speed across the school yard and was the first one inside the school for the Kindergarten classes. That’s made a huge difference. The teacher is happy that Hayley is showing signs of understanding a lot of things, being (in her words) “very bright”, and that she seems to have fun with all the singing and dancing and learning. I asked how she is with other kids and she said that Hayley’s the kind of kid who gets along with everyone and jokingly referred to her as the Mother Theresa of the class because she’s always being nice to everyone, helping anyone who needs it, and eager to do things with people.

She did say that sometimes she has the feeling Hayley has the answer to a question but she’s shy (maybe afraid of being wrong?) and won’t immediately volunteer to answer unless she sees other people have raised their hand as well, but that she’s getting better with that with every day.

I didn’t tell Hayley we had a meeting because I had no idea if we’d get to see her at school and didn’t want to upset her if we didn’t. However, they had just been down in the cafeteria for lunch for about ten minutes when we arrived. Breanna loves the teacher, so she ran right up to her for a hug and the teacher said, “let’s bring her down to see her big sister!” Hayley was so surprised to see us all there (as was one of the supervision monitors, a friend of ours). Two months ago, seeing us for two minutes and having us leave would have caused sad drama; today she hugged us and went off with her friends, making no big fuss that we had to leave.

Breanna enjoyed being there and was super-well-behaved. She let the teacher carry her around and then when we got to the classroom, I pulled out a notepad and pen from my purse and she sat at Hayley’s table and drew while the three of us talked.

I’m so happy that Hayloey is doing so well with school now, especially since she was so excited over the summer, frantic for the school year to start. When she had a hard time it was so hard on all of us because it was just so sad. The difference is amazing.

Now to schedule another volunteer session!