Life @ the Hoover Household: It is Finished... Sort of

Okay At the bottom will be some pictures. Some people want their Hoover dose.
School finished out May 29th for Jonathan. He'll officially be in fourth Grade.
We made the difficult decision to pull Daniel out to homeschool on May 4th, abruptly ending his school year.
We were in the middle of a major dispute with our school district and there were attorneys involved. I won't get into major details but it did get WAY worse before it got better. Absolutely crazy.
Our advice: unless the crap is hitting the fan and people are outright screwing up majorly, and breaking several federal laws regarding your child with a disability at school, do not file due process. This was an extremely emotionally draining experience, as well as a time hog. we had to basically clear our calendar and be ready for anything.

If you have been dealing with a school district and hitting the same brick walls and getting no or little movement as we were. My sincerest empathies. Go to COPAA and Find a great educational attorney or Advocate. Find out what your rights are and fight for it.

We are happy to announce we are no longer amid a Due Process lawsuit.
We were able to attend a mediation with the school district and get what we wanted.
What this means for us is we are going into a new season. With a new school, with new teachers, more therapy and yes everyone is getting training in the areas of restraint and seclusion and it's legal and not legal uses.. We get new IEP meetings and documents and both boys are getting new evaluations so their programming and supports match their needs.

We'd Like to thank....

We'd first of all want to Thank God for pretty much, showing up and rescuing us from the desperate ditch we were in.
2nd (keeping it general because I'd be remiss to forget someone)
Thank you to all of our friends/Family for your friendship, love and support.
Especially those who gave us sound advice, prayed for us when we needed it, and talked us off the ledge of our sanity, and especially if you made us laugh.
We would like to thank those especially that we know of or don't know about who have been praying along and have prayed "Jericho" prayers for us. This is a huge answer for us although this may only right our ship so we can move along. We appreciate your prayers and covet every last one.

We would like to thank the Miller Family for volunteering to watch our kids while went to various meetings. We owe you so beyond everything, gratitude doesn't seem enough.

We'd like to thank the professionals we trusted and continue to trust to help us navigate what horrible situation we had been in for a while. They like to think of themselves like roadside assistance with supernatural vision. We could not discern how deep a ditch we were in with Daniel and apparently after they dug through records and talked to us...we had apparently not just gotten in a ditch but had also were hanging dangerously off the side of a mountain and had overheated. We needed a tow truck (due process). Somehow Daniel had slipped through so many cracks, no one knew what they were doing or where he should be.
as an aside I would like to thank Daniels developmental pediatrician and regular pediatrician for sharing our sentiment about our kids and their situations and for allowing us to use them (although very sparingly) to try and get what Daniel and Jonathan needed.

What we learned.

We learned several things.
The first being that having a child with special needs comes with a little bit of a filter. You see only SOME of the stuff you're dealing with while the rest you may not see completely. We always hope that we see things seeing totally objectively, but sometimes we can't see everything and that's okay.

Secondly, we cannot do everything we want for our children to the extent we want to. We strive to be awesome advocates for our children but there is only so much we can do . When we discovered there were some pretty heavy legal issues going on in our situation with Daniel, we reached the end of what we could do ourselves and called an attorney. Best and most difficult phone call ever.
We had to deal with our pride of not being able to handle this on our own and now realize we were never meant to go through things on our own.

Being also the parent of a Rare and undiagnosed child a lot of our issues are over not being stuck to a label (because we don't have any) and just treating and dealing with what issues we CAN see.
We also deal a lot with people who tend to brush us off because our kids "look" normal.
Looks can be very deceiving. If you know us well, we fight our well picked battles and try to live life as best we can. Some days we're not going to always win.

We cherish the little things because that's what being blessed is about.