a note on playgroup

Ach! I tried to write something last night but I was tired and uneasy and nothing that I wrote down was true to what was going on. So I try again.

The play group met and went well. I have to keep reminding myself that progress in this sort of program is very slow. The kids are not really using the directions and instructions that I write out and yet, I keep writing. I hope they get around to using those things, but there seems to be a lot of interaction going on between the kids as we all stumble through our time together. I am very comfortable with the group not going perfectly yet. We are still new and need practice. Others are not so pleased and I have a request for more training and questions. For me, as long as we keep working at the group and keep reading, we will get it. We will understand how to facilitate play for the children.

I don't know quite where I get the confidence. Certainly, I have as much trouble steering my team as the other team leaders, but I have a very strong conviction that we, as parents, have to expend an awful lot of effort for these kids, and that daily living has provided us with lots of expertise that we can build on. Maybe for me it is just that we had our child come into our lives when she was already a 5 year old, and without even a hint about what she was like. To some extent, we have unraveled her and figured a few things out. And that was so much more difficult than any of the kids in our playgroup. I don't mean that I could take on any kid with social skill deficits but the kids we have in our group are all well loved and have very concerned parents. They have backgrounds and they do survive day to day in their classrooms.

I am trying to write my way into an answer here and I don't have one. I am just so sure we are doing the right thing at the right time for the right reason, and that's just not enough.