Random stuff over the next few days
I had something to say, and then I forgot it. Go me. All right, on to the everyday stuff.
GOING OUT: Tomorrow evening I'm going to catch a movie with outcast_spice, which will undoubtedly be fun (and huzzah for escaping the house to hang out with another adult).
SLEEP: Tuesday I have a consultation at the sleep clinic (I asked my family doc to refer me for a sleep study). Thanks to philady's excellent advice, I'll be able to go in there with exactly two weeks of a completed sleep log, so that should help the sleep doc figure out what's going on. Once we've had our consult then they book me for the actual sleep study itself, which sounds like it'll be in late April. It will be really nice to finally have some answers.
CONNOR: Wednesday I'm off to a hearing clinic with Connor. He needs his hearing checked. While he's been learning a lot of new words recently, they don't have nearly the level of intelligibility you'd expect from a two-year-old - even his dad and I have to guess and guess and guess as to his meaning. He's started using multiple-word sentences, but at the same time, he's turning multi-syllable words into single-syllable and running them all together. For example, "I did it!" sounds like "IdiIh." Other things are really fuzzy - "milk" is a kind of "nih" sound. He isn't showing any other signs of autism other than speech delay, so I'm fairly certain he's not an autie. But he *does* have a history of fussing with his ears (which can indicate ear infections), although he never had an ear infection serious enough to require antibiotics or even just a doctor visit. I'm really wondering though if he has what's called "otitis media with effusion" - basically, fluid builds up in the middle ear, and it can be chronic/continuous. If that's the case, then everything he's hearing will sound as if it's coming through water - muffled and fuzzy. If that's what he's hearing, it makes sense that those are the sounds he'd reproduce.
It's fairly straightforward to fix otitis media with effusion; they put little tubes into the ears to assist with drainage, and the hearing problem solves itself almost immediately. Only about one in a thousand children have a serious side effect as a result of the tubes, so it's a pretty low-risk surgery.
The hearing test should be able to detect fluid in the ears (they do a test that measures resistance to sound waves). If it isn't fluid in the ears, then I don't know what it might be. We've been doing all the tricks we were taught during Gavin's speech therapy - speak slowly and clearly, hold items by your mouth while saying the item's name (so the child looks at your lips and tongue forming the word), getting down on his level, etc. They haven't been making an appreciable difference. At least I got him on the waiting list for the Toronto-area speech assessment organization, so if it isn't a hearing issue, then speech therapists will be checking him out in a few more months anyway. (The waiting list is 6-8 months, but I got him on the waiting list around 4 months ago. Having had the benefit of previous experience with Gavin, now I don't waste time. If we have to cancel our spot on the waiting list because it's no longer necessary, that's far better than beginning the 6-8 month wait after we have test results back.)
AUNT FLO: I'm a bleedy bleeding thing. Nobody really cares about this, I'm just saying it because periodically I try to calculate how far apart my periods are, and noting it down in my journal helps with that. I should really resume charting, but I'm kind of lazy.
GOING OUT: Tomorrow evening I'm going to catch a movie with outcast_spice, which will undoubtedly be fun (and huzzah for escaping the house to hang out with another adult).
SLEEP: Tuesday I have a consultation at the sleep clinic (I asked my family doc to refer me for a sleep study). Thanks to philady's excellent advice, I'll be able to go in there with exactly two weeks of a completed sleep log, so that should help the sleep doc figure out what's going on. Once we've had our consult then they book me for the actual sleep study itself, which sounds like it'll be in late April. It will be really nice to finally have some answers.
CONNOR: Wednesday I'm off to a hearing clinic with Connor. He needs his hearing checked. While he's been learning a lot of new words recently, they don't have nearly the level of intelligibility you'd expect from a two-year-old - even his dad and I have to guess and guess and guess as to his meaning. He's started using multiple-word sentences, but at the same time, he's turning multi-syllable words into single-syllable and running them all together. For example, "I did it!" sounds like "IdiIh." Other things are really fuzzy - "milk" is a kind of "nih" sound. He isn't showing any other signs of autism other than speech delay, so I'm fairly certain he's not an autie. But he *does* have a history of fussing with his ears (which can indicate ear infections), although he never had an ear infection serious enough to require antibiotics or even just a doctor visit. I'm really wondering though if he has what's called "otitis media with effusion" - basically, fluid builds up in the middle ear, and it can be chronic/continuous. If that's the case, then everything he's hearing will sound as if it's coming through water - muffled and fuzzy. If that's what he's hearing, it makes sense that those are the sounds he'd reproduce.
It's fairly straightforward to fix otitis media with effusion; they put little tubes into the ears to assist with drainage, and the hearing problem solves itself almost immediately. Only about one in a thousand children have a serious side effect as a result of the tubes, so it's a pretty low-risk surgery.
The hearing test should be able to detect fluid in the ears (they do a test that measures resistance to sound waves). If it isn't fluid in the ears, then I don't know what it might be. We've been doing all the tricks we were taught during Gavin's speech therapy - speak slowly and clearly, hold items by your mouth while saying the item's name (so the child looks at your lips and tongue forming the word), getting down on his level, etc. They haven't been making an appreciable difference. At least I got him on the waiting list for the Toronto-area speech assessment organization, so if it isn't a hearing issue, then speech therapists will be checking him out in a few more months anyway. (The waiting list is 6-8 months, but I got him on the waiting list around 4 months ago. Having had the benefit of previous experience with Gavin, now I don't waste time. If we have to cancel our spot on the waiting list because it's no longer necessary, that's far better than beginning the 6-8 month wait after we have test results back.)
AUNT FLO: I'm a bleedy bleeding thing. Nobody really cares about this, I'm just saying it because periodically I try to calculate how far apart my periods are, and noting it down in my journal helps with that. I should really resume charting, but I'm kind of lazy.