"The art of mothering is to teach the art of living to children"
Julia's evaluation went pretty well this morning, all things considered.
Two ladies from CDS came over at 8:30, and were later joined by Hannah, Julia's case manager. The whole process took almost three hours, but Julia only had to participate for about two thirds of it. They had a whole range of tasks for her to complete like scribbling on a piece of paper, stringing beads, identifying toys, matching shapes, and just responding to verbal prompts. Some of the stuff she didn't get, and in the beginning she absolutely would not sit still and kept running off in different directions, but otherwise she behaved really well and only flipped her little lid once or twice.
They explained to me that the scoring system is based on what they observe, their professional opinions, and the input they obtain from me, the parent. She scored pretty low in the Language category, which I fully expected, and was also below average in cognitive, mostly because of her very short attention span. She was within normal range for the categories of personal/social, adaptive, and motor skills.
So Hannah put us on a waiting list for speech therapy. Once she starts, probably in a month or so, she'll have it an hour a week for a year, and then they will re-evaluate her. They didn't see a need for any other type of therapies at this point, so that's good. And, since the speech therapist will be working with a team of other specialists anyway, if there ever was a need we would have resources. The other thing they recommended is that we get Julia's hearing tested, just to rule out any issues in that area.
I'm really glad to have gotten this part over with. At least now we have somewhat of a plan. One of the ladies advised me that once she starts therapy, a lot of it will be the therapist teaching ME ways to work with Julia, and I actually think that's great, and makes a lot of sense. I would rather have the tools to teach her myself than just drop her off at some office somewhere and hope for the best. It makes me feel better knowing that I am going to be involved.
So now I have tomorrow to relax, and then it's back to lovely, wonderful Gray Birch for the weekend.
Two ladies from CDS came over at 8:30, and were later joined by Hannah, Julia's case manager. The whole process took almost three hours, but Julia only had to participate for about two thirds of it. They had a whole range of tasks for her to complete like scribbling on a piece of paper, stringing beads, identifying toys, matching shapes, and just responding to verbal prompts. Some of the stuff she didn't get, and in the beginning she absolutely would not sit still and kept running off in different directions, but otherwise she behaved really well and only flipped her little lid once or twice.
They explained to me that the scoring system is based on what they observe, their professional opinions, and the input they obtain from me, the parent. She scored pretty low in the Language category, which I fully expected, and was also below average in cognitive, mostly because of her very short attention span. She was within normal range for the categories of personal/social, adaptive, and motor skills.
So Hannah put us on a waiting list for speech therapy. Once she starts, probably in a month or so, she'll have it an hour a week for a year, and then they will re-evaluate her. They didn't see a need for any other type of therapies at this point, so that's good. And, since the speech therapist will be working with a team of other specialists anyway, if there ever was a need we would have resources. The other thing they recommended is that we get Julia's hearing tested, just to rule out any issues in that area.
I'm really glad to have gotten this part over with. At least now we have somewhat of a plan. One of the ladies advised me that once she starts therapy, a lot of it will be the therapist teaching ME ways to work with Julia, and I actually think that's great, and makes a lot of sense. I would rather have the tools to teach her myself than just drop her off at some office somewhere and hope for the best. It makes me feel better knowing that I am going to be involved.
So now I have tomorrow to relax, and then it's back to lovely, wonderful Gray Birch for the weekend.