Today was the twins first full day home with us, and by midday I was already speaking to the representative responsible for their school registration for next year.

He told me what the charedi options are; since there’s nothing local, they have to go other places. However, in those other cities they give priority to their citizens and often the classes fill up before there’s room for children from outlying areas. He’s going to put them on a list tomorrow and I trust we’ll find a place for them for the coming school year.

I also spoke with our social worker (yes, again!). Yesterday I broached a topic I’ve been thinking about quite a lot, which is what to do regarding kindergarten for the end of the year.

In the lectures of Dr. Karyn Purvis, founder of Trust Based Relationship Intervention (TBRI), she says that she’s never seen a child, no matter how damaging their background and how traumatized they were, that can’t experience significant healing. She recommends that when they come home, parents do an intensive home intervention (intensive relationship building) with a foster or adopted child; this is the most critical and important thing you can do to facilitate healing.

For every year a child has been in a hard place, she says they need a month of intensive home intervention.

That would put us at six months in our situation. I feel very strongly that this would be the right thing to do for them, but have been afraid to make that commitment before meeting them. The description of what we were facing was intimidating; we were warned repeatedly by the social workers we would be taking on something very big to bring them home, and that was assuming they would be in school most of the day. There’s a full staff helping each of them at school, and I’m going to do it all without any assistance? I knew I couldn’t take it on alone; I need to have some time to myself without constantly being ‘on’.

Enter my husband getting paternity leave! We’ve been discussing this, and agreed we can commit to keeping them home with us for six weeks. At that point, it should bring us close to the end of the school year.

In special ed the schools continue with summer camp programs almost through the entire summer, with just a two week vacation. I’ve never sent ds10 and ds6 in the summer, and I would want to keep the twins home as well. That adds another two months.

Two weeks into the school year, the fall holidays begin and continue for a month. If we could keep them home until after Sukkos, that means we would have five months to work with them. I am confident they would be much more available for learning and healthy relationships by then.

Though I was thinking about this for a good while, I didn’t want to suggest it to the social worker, because I was afraid social services would be happy to throw all the responsibility on my shoulders without offering support services, in light of the difficulties they were having working out the school situation.

My social worker thinks this would be the best possible thing, but today warned me she has to get approval from higher ups for that. She said that since they get therapies (weekly speech, OT and whatever else is the norm in special ed kindergartens), they might object on terms of it delaying their development by them not getting those therapies for six weeks. (The question is just about them missing school until the end of the year; I’m going to assume I don’t have to get approval for the summer vacation.) I’m waiting to hear about that.

If we get the approval to keep them home, I’m going to create a home program for them. I’ve emailed a TBRI practitioner in the US to ask about working with us to design an intensive home program and am waiting to hear back from her. I can probably put something pretty effective together myself – and that might be what ends up happening – but welcome the input from those with more experience than me.

If we don’t get the approval, we’ll begin sending them to school probably at the beginning of next week. In that case, they’ll have two months over summer vacation and almost a month of holidays to keep them home. It’s not the same as a five month stretch of uninterrupted time, but will nonetheless be valuable.

Avivah