Oh WOW!! The short meeting with the teachers just got BIGGER. Now I have 20 min with the 2 teachers, the school psych, principal, and the district gifted coordinator... Oh boy...
Help please!
Warning - humor ahead!
I used to get really nervous trying to plan for meetings while working through the IEP eligibility process for my ds. The advocate I worked with used to give me the same advice over and over again (and I've seen it mentioned everywhere online and in books) - take muffins. Or donuts. Or cookies. Something baked and yummy and sweet as a token of your good intentions of working as a team, of being on the same side, working together, getting the meeting off to a good "we're all a happy family" start.
Well - I'm a mom of three. I don't have time to know what day it is, much less bake. And oh yeah, I have a child with a disability (who at the time was frequently imploding over school), as well as a child for whom "focus" is still an alien word, and that third child who fights every single darned thing in any given day... all of whom I was constantly driving all over town to all their different activities as well as therapies during all our waking hours. I had no time to bake. Which was really irrelevant anyway, because I don't like to bake. In a previous life, I might have used stronger language about my feelings about baking from scratch
I also had visions of our school "team" - the sped staff, the admin rep who had to be present, the school psych, etc - going to multiple x multiple team meetings for the huge number of students who already had IEPs or who were being evaluated etc.... and having to be faced with a new set of sugar-filled, fattening muffins every time they went to a meeting. I could just imagine one of these people taking one look at my warm-out-of-the-oven magazine-cover-worthy muffins I'd hated baking and throwing up at the thought of having to pretend to enjoy one more muffin, while in the meantime, the rest of the once-skinny and now-portly staff folks politely declined what had taken me hours to create (since I'd burned the first batch and the second batch had fallen flat and I'd had to make a last-minute run by the grocery store with all fingers crossed hoping beyond hope there was a package of freshly backed muffins that didn't have "grocery store" radiating from their look and taste
Soooo... I never brought muffins or anything (although I ate a lot of muffins all by myself before meetings!).
I don't think it mattered
So there you have it - complete non-advice!
Good luck this afternoon,
polarbear
