'big school' beckons

Having spent the past eight years getting used to multiple disabilities including damaged feet and visual impairment, I began to worry about how I would manage preparations for my son’s first day at primary school many months before his start date. My first big task was to organise his new uniform.

Buttons and shoelaces are fiddly for me to do up. I’ve managed to avoid them when buying Kirit’s clothes until now, but on receiving details of his new school outfit, I decided to bite the bullet and tackle the inevitable shopping trip head on.

The bad news for me is that shopping, which was once my favourite pastime, is fast losing its appeal. It has now become a wheeling, speeding, trying-on, shopping trolley dash around the superstore before my son gets bored and my fatigue levels reach a peak. It wouldn’t normally matter but ‘big school’ beckoned and there was not only a uniform to be bought but a new spread of outfits for a sexy, sassy, worried-what-other- parents-will-think-of-me mother such as myself.

At home, following a surprisingly successful shopping trip, I decided to dress my son in his new uniform. Deep breath taken, we began with the trousers.
Somehow I managed to shake Kirit into them, leaning precariously out of my wheelchair as I did so. Unfortunately he became so overwhelmingly excited by this, that he ran around and around my wheelchair as I attempted to disengage the first pair of trousers from their own twin pair, which was attached by a price tag at the waist. Eventually I gave up and tried to undo the new shirt, buttons done up tight, as he narrowly missed tripping over my chair while continuing to circle me. To my dismay, my daughter, still a toddler, joined in the merry-go-round. I gave up on the shirt and moved on quickly, tackling the mercifully pull-on school jumper. This went over his head without incident and it even fit. Thankfully this was a dry run. Let’s hope it’s not like that every morning of term.

Now that the uniform had been sorted out, my next task was to figure out how I’d get Kirit to and from school each day. I don’t drive and there’s no way I could ever make it as far as the bus stop, self-propelling my wheelchair and with both my under-fives in toe. Someone told me about the existence of a school bus, but that the waiting list for this tends to be around two years long. As a last resort, I was all set to beg the LEA for a taxi to take the three of us there and back twice a day when we got some very good news. To my surprise, the school agreed to find my son a seat on the much coveted school bus, which would carry him safely door to door.

The week before he was due to start, Kirit and I went to the introductory meeting at his new school. I was originally assured that it wouldn’t be a group affair, but rather an individualised event where the teacher of the reception class would interview parents one by one. However when we arrived, the rest of Kirit’s class plus mums and dads were all present, rolling out play-doh or playing in the home-corner and giving the teddies an early lunch.

I was worried that the other children would want to ask me questions and poke and prod my chair but they didn’t pay any attention at all.

My wheelchair was too big for the small classroom, but Kirit was desperate to show Mummy his new coat peg and the like. That meant traversing the mass of under-five’s playing in my path. Resourceful as ever I decided not to risk mowing down the children and parents. Instead, I handed my digital camera to the classroom assistant who went with my son to photograph everything that would be important to him in his first days there. It wasn’t ideal but we both left happy.