Ready...Set...Preschool!

So I thought I had about a year before I needed to think about preschool for Isaiah.  With his lack of language creating in the potty training department we don't plan on trying until Isaiah is three, and you have to be potty trained to go to preschool.  This is true for private preschools but not for the local school systems.  It's actually quite interesting how Isaiah's transition from Early Intervention into preschool will be.  In two weeks we have Isaiah's six month evaluation.  It's kind of a check in since it has been six months since he has been initially evaluated to qualify for the program.  We will discuss what they call "transition" at this time.  It turns out that in December or beginning of January Isaiah will be evaluated by the school district in order to qualify him for a certain amount of "speech minutes" each week in the preschool program.  Here is where it gets tricky.  Different school systems are better than others (this is obvious not matter what grade your child is in) and each school district will qualify Isaiah for a different set of minutes each week.  Isaiah's speech therapist is going to push for Isaiah to receive 120 minutes a week of speech assistance however that doesn't guarantee us anything.  With all the budget cuts in the schools there are some schools that are only offering as little as 30 minutes a week!  Yikes!  Fortunately we are renting and we can seek out the better school districts and move to that suburb so that Isaiah can receive services (of course better schools are in the three most expensive suburbs in south Chicago more property taxes!).  So I'm starting to feel the crunch!  We move to a new rental house in two months, three months later Isaiah gets evaluated by the schools, and two months after that we start preschool!  It is nice that EI helps with the transition into preschool and our social worker says she will help me find summer speech programs for Isaiah for when he is done with his first year of preschool.  This is all the plan of action if we stay in Chicago.  Who knows with Mark's work!  In the meantime we feel blessed to have such a wonderful support system for our favorite two year old!