Oh my God, you guys, I have had an incredible couple of days. I have many good and exciting things to tell you.

First of all, I met with part of Jack’s team at school for our pre-IEP/goal creating meeting yesterday. It was phenomenal. I walked out of that place feeling high. I was all prepared to argue why I thought Jack needs a peer buddy system, a la MOM-NOS. I walked in with my stack of papers and my charts of goals and looked at the papers they had prepared, and right there on top was a peer buddy system.

They looked at my list of goals and took it with them to add to their goals. They looked at my suggestions on the goals they’d already written and happily added in all my suggestions. The speech therapist and school counselor had just been to an autism seminar the day before and were all excited to help Jack.

When I handed them the My Friend With Autism coloring book I’d photocopied with a suggestion to give it to his classmates, their only question was, “Can we really keep this?” When I suggested that we have some peer education about autism for the other first graders, their only question was, “Would you like us to do it when Jack is there or when he’s out of the room?” When I expressed my concern about Jack not knowing any of the other kids’ names and being isolated in his classroom, they gave me their ideas to piggyback on my suggestions.

Even though many of my goal suggestions were social, not once did any of them say, “But what does this have to do with his academic success?” They never once suggested that because he is above grade level that he doesn’t need the support he gets. They asked me if I wanted him in ESY (extended school year, special ed style) and agreed when I said I did.

It was incredible. Jack and I are lucky people to have this team. They really seem to care about him, from his aides all the way up to the principal who saw me in the hall and called me into his office because, “I haven’t seen you for a while and I wanted to know how things are going.”

Do I sound excited? I am. It was an amazing hour.

Then, as if that weren’t enough, today I attended the first day of a three-day conference I’m attending called Diamonds in the Rough about “smart kids who learn differently.”

Today was just the pre-conference, so I attended two three-hour sessions. They were both fantastic, but the first one completely blew my mind. Jonathan Mooney spoke about neurodiversity to a small group of about 30 people. I honestly can’t remember the last time someone inspired me so much. And not in a gooey, faithy type of way, but in a hope, hope, HOPE! type of way.

I go to a fair number of these autism/special education events and, I gotta tell you, I often leave them feeling bummed out. The system is broken, or at least badly damaged, and while it is vital to learn that, it is depressing.

I left Mooney’s lecture in happy tears. Yeah, I’m the idiot who burst out in tears after Mooney’s rousing closing words, which included these three very important words for us to impart to our children: “YOU’RE NOT BROKEN.”

I may or may not have told the lady next to me (through sobby tears, mind you), “I have a six-year-old with autism and he’s perfect!”

I am such a dipshit.

I have a tremendous number of things rolling around in my head that I want to write about concerning that lecture, as well as the rest of the conference, past and yet-to-come. I’ll probably end up writing about it over at Autism Unexpected, but will try to remember to link to it from here.

I know this is kind of a brain dump post, but there is just so much Happy and Hope and Good in my brain right now that I wanted to share it with you. Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll soon be full of ennui again and be able to blog about ridiculous things that tiny animals do.