If you are like most mothers, before many weeks have gone by you will be eager to visit your boy and see for yourself how he is getting on; whether he is really as happy as the letters from school assure you he is; what he is learning in class, and whether he has blankets enough on his bed and sugar enough on his oatmeal.

But before the letter announcing the day of your arrival is posted or your ticket is bought, sit down by the fire and think the matter over.

You have confidence in the school, else you would never have sent your boy there; and you have been told repeatedly either that the little fellow is happy and well or, it may be, that he was rather homesick at first, but has now settled down to a very comfortable and contented state of mind and is doing well in class.

Now, if you go to see him too soon after he has left home there will really be a good deal more danger that the boy will be homesick after you leave him than there was when you took him to school in September, even if he has been quite happy up to the time of your visit.

In the first place, he will think, drawing his conclusions from visits that he may have made before, that school is over and that you have come to take him home.  So it will be a great surprise and shock when you go away without him.  And in any case, after the separation of some weeks, his love for you will make him want to be with you, and he will really suffer when you say good-by.

So, if I were you, I would wait till after the Christmas holidays before going for my visit.  By that time he will be fully settled in his new life and will look on it as an established part of existence.  He will know from observation that other mothers come for a little while and then go home again without taking their children with them, and his advance in understanding will make it much easier to explain to him that your visit is temporary and will not make any radical change in his own life.

The delay will mean a good deal of self-sacrifice for you, but may very possibly save your boy from a sharp attack of homesickness, while later in the year this danger will usually have disappeared, and your visit will bring nothing but pleasure to you both and will help to make school what you want it to be—­a place where all sorts of delightful things are constantly sure to happen.

XXV

DURING THE SCHOOL PERIOD

But the opportunities and obligations of the parents of deaf children to aid in their education by no means cease when the children enter school.