Yesterday’s News: Our outstanding Connecticut Department of Developmental Services case manager visited the young ladies’ apartment yesterday. She sent me an email to express how much she liked the apartment, how happy the girls seem to be and what a wonderful job Ability Beyond Disability has done in fulfilling the record keeping requirements of DDS. That is huge as anything that falls short in the State’s eyes would be very troublesome for all of us. Thank you ABD and Tanya Medve!

Loose Ends: There are lots of loose ends. Our daughter’s iPod Touch, provided by our school district last summer and full of social skills apps that she used at school, is now being reloaded by ABD for our daughter’s new life. Just some questions re: logins. Easy to rectify. Perhaps they can program information on the streets of Ridgefield, locations for services and answers to questions related to her new autonomy.

Book Keeping: Not my forte, though I have run my own business for thirty-five years. Different side of the brain. Alas, I owe DDS more information on a grant we received last year to help offset respite costs. I keep sending them the information, but as I moved to mostly paperless banking, I do not get checks returned to me anymore. Hence, I had to print out a bank statement and circle the related payment for her summer programming at Riverview. Now they want me to track down her “sitter” to have her sign off on a receipt for a couple hundred bucks of hourly time last summer. I know this is the life. I just renewed her yearly guardianship form at the Probate office two days ago and soon will have to do the three-year renewal. Every year we can expect to re-certify that our gal has a legitimate disability. The paperwork will only increase, I suspect, the process becoming more convoluted and risky, as the governments wield their machetes at entitlements, human lives and futures.

Busy Bees: It is a wild image and probably inaccurate, nevertheless I feel as if our daughter and I are the Queen Bees and all the worker bees from Ability and DDS are building the hive and securing the future so there is a plentiful and ongoing flow of the honey of happy living. Bit of a stretch and we all know what happens to the bees, but still, that’s the image and I am grateful indeed. Fingers crossed, that government machete won’t see its way to our hive. Fingers crossed!

©Jill Edelman, M.S.W., L.C.S.W. 2011