As homeschoolers, we had avoided any contact with the public schools, and had no intention of starting up with them just because we now had a child with disabilities. To my relief, she assured me that many people were homeschooling disabled kids, and they were thriving. This was the first encouraging word I’d heard since Joshua had been diagnosed.

She recommended a book to read that would provide a good idea of what was involved in early intervention. When Slow is Fast Enough ,by Dr. Joan Goodman, is a detailed description of Dr. Goodman’s study of early intervention for small children with disabilities. Reading that book helped me realize that we would want to homeschool Joshua for all the same reasons we homeschooled his siblings. And so we did. Homeschooling him has been a team effort. We have all worked with him, played with him, and sometimes, civilized him.

Over the years, we have had Joshua in some therapy. He was in private speech and physical therapy when he was a baby, but we stopped both by the time he was two. The therapists were very young and by-the-book, and we felt it wasn’t worth the time and money involved. But we still wanted some form of speech therapy for him, as his greatest delay is in speech. While he is very aware of what is going on, he cannot express himself clearly. Of course, he still manages to make his desires known, and we can generally tell what he is saying, but he needs to be able to communicate with others outside the family, too.

Fortunately, a fellow homeschooler recommended a wonderful speech therapist to us several years ago, and Josh has been seeing her weekly for the past few years. She is friendly to the idea of homeschooling, and during his sessions, I sit in and she shows me what to do with him at home. I have learned a lot by watching her. She is patient yet persistent, and that is what he needs.

Josh likes to "do school" because he sees his brother and sisters doing their schoolwork, and he wants to be like them. As the youngest sibling, that is his prime motivation. In fact, I often say he has Youngest Child Syndrome. He wants to do whatever he sees them doing, and that is so good for him. He has learned to play games on the computer, hit a ball pitched to him, make a basket with the basketball and draw elaborate pictures, all because he started out imitating one of his siblings doing those things. When he sees them involved in something interesting, he’ll call out "Me do it!" And then he does.

His siblings are on the phone a lot, and he wants to talk, too. We have found that handing the phone to him when a telemarketer calls makes him very happy. He jabbers away in his own language, then scowls and says "Hey!" when he hears the inevitable dial tone.

&#Occasionally, his desire to do what the others do gets him in trouble. His teenage siblings have computers in their rooms, bought with their own hard-earned money. Joshua has been known to go on one of their computers and "work". After he opened some windows and deleted a few things, they learned to put passwords on important functions.