The Kind of Scheduling Problems You Want to Have

All of a sudden, my son has a social life.

I'm not used to him having places to go and people to see. We've always been able to schedule therapies and appointments any old whenever because his only competing obligations were whatever was playing on Nickelodeon.

But a few months ago, he and a couple of friends started attending a special-needs social group in our town. And from that has come opportunities to compete in Special Olympics events, and practices for those events, and dinners and dances given by charitable groups. Combine that with his Challenger League baseball games starting up about now, and suddenly, I have a busy boy.

Which is what we all want, right? How we dream of social connections for our kids. But ... logistically, it's a little tricky, isn't it? I'm going to have to figure out somewhere to put his speech therapy now, because his formerly idle Saturday mornings are now chock-full of athletic competition. There's practice on some weekday afternoons, too, so no predictable time to put sessions there, either. Already, his voice lessons are bumping up against his Friday evening out.

He's not to sure about all this activity, being a guy who values his downtime. I'm trying not to overwhelm him or us, either. But I want him to take advantage of everything there is, to be out among others, getting to know and be known. SpongeBob will understand.