How I Spent My Summer Vacation

“Life is what happens while you’re making other plans.” ~ John Lennon

It seems like only yesterday that we were on the road, driving through the amber waves of grain, over the purple mountains majesty, and across the fruited plains. Though those poor plains were pretty flooded when we drove past them.

But that was June.

When we finally arrived in Pennsylvania, at my parent’s house, it felt like we had tons of time to explore the area and find our final nesting place. But suddenly it’s the middle of September and we’re still in the same spot.

What have we been doing for the past three months? Well, it turns out time flies when you’re having fun.

The last week of June Karyn and I were gearing up for the National Down Syndrome Congress Convention. A whirlwind weekend of lectures and workshops where everyone in the Ds community comes to learn and share the latest news in medicine, education & advocacy.  It was a great weekend, and it became a final farewell to some our dear friends at Club 21, as we got to hug them one last time.

But it was also very informative. One of our big concerns moving here was finding a great school district where Rumi can thrive and Dashiell can grow. We asked every local at the convention where they thought we should live, and just about every one of them had a different answer. It turns out there are a lot of great schools here.

Armed with a list of school districts to check out we started making phone calls. But most places were on Summer break and had reduced schedules. So we weren’t able to get anything booked before we has to pack our bags once again and head off to Minnesota for a family reunion, and to celebrate Karyn’s parent’s 50th anniversary.

Minnesota was amazing. A week at a lake house can do wonders for your soul. The kids loved spending time with cousins, and splashing in the water. I think the only time Dashiell wasn’t in/on the water was when he was sleeping. It was a great trip, and even though we’d just driven 2400 miles across the whole country, the kids didn’t bat an eye when we did another 1800 miles to the Midwest and back.

But then it’s the tail end of July and we realized that some schools start back up in the middle of August. And we still hadn’t seen a single one!

We quickly made a bunch of appointments and rushed through a handful of tours in one week. They were all really awesome. South Fayette, North Allegheny, Montour, Peters Township, Ringgold. (Do you guys know about Montour Elementary? They have a Lego learning lab! Where was that when I was in school?)

But the one piece of the puzzle, maybe the biggest piece at this point, I still haven’t found a job. I don’t know how many meeting/lunches I’ve gone to, but I still haven’t found a full-time gig. Which means we aren’t going to be getting an apartment in a new neighborhood, which means we can’t enroll Dashiell & Rumi into any of the awesome schools we toured.

Except for one. The same school I attended when I was a kid. Right down the street from the house I grew up in. A mere 10 minute walk away.

It’s not that we didn’t want to enroll him there, it’s just that we hadn’t planned on still living with my parent’s by this point in the year. I really thought I’d be able to swoop in and land something amazing within a couple of weeks. Whether that’s naiveté on my part or just poor planning, it doesn’t really matter. This is where we are now.

So Dashiell is a couple of weeks into first grade. He wasn’t really crazy about it at first, but I think he’s settling into this new routine. And we’re also on the road to getting Rumi set up for services, and learning about some new medical issues she has to deal with. It’s probably not going to be everything we want, but it’s a start. And we’re finding more and more allies here to help guide us through the system here, which is actually been really great so far.

And really, being closer to family was the main goal of this whole endeavor. So, for the time being, I’m counting it all as win.