Bye, Bye Speech

Sadly, today was our very last speech session with Cathy. There are not enough kind words to say about Cathy. She took Grace from a child who, a year ago, did little more than gesture and sign to a child with an entire vocabulary. The transformation has been amazing. Cathy came into our home, fit in like a family member and loved my children. While we are glad to get a therapy break until September we are VERY sad to see her go.

And only one more OT session to go too...

Gracie's Speech Eval

This morning was Gracie's speech evaluation at school. The great news is that the kid is smart as a whip. The bad news is that because she is so freaking clever she scores too darn high to qualify for services based off speech alone. It is very, very, very frustrating. The speech therapist told me that she could obviously benefit from speech services to work on her clarity, volume regulation, breath regulation and articulation but the numbers HAVE TO FIT. AAAHHHH!!!!!!

What she did tell me is that a lot of kids on the fence will qualify based on their OT needs and Gracie's SPD is a moderate to severe case. So hopefully OT will be our golden ticket so to speak. We haven't set up that eval yet but it should be in the next week or so.

Tomorrow Abby has her PT eval, which is her last assessment. Thank goodness we have one kid done! I am getting really tired of the whole thing.

Gracie's Progress

It's been a while since I posted anything about Gracie's progress with speech. She has a tendency to take two steps forward than one back. It is partly personality and partly the issues we deal with with her. She is doing very well overall and her speech is getting better. People outside the family still can't understand most of what she says but we're getting there.

Here is a video of her being generally silly and also reading 8 Silly Monkeys...

Where they are at

As a part of the prep for our 6 month EI review tomorrow we had to do some assessments and paperwork for each of the girls. One of the telling pieces of that process is when they give me the age equivalents of where the girls are at. While I realize there isn't an exact science to it I always find that number to be very interesting. We didn't do ages for OT since we missed last week (our OT was away) but that number is less relevant anyway. For Gracie her receptive speech is between 22 and 24 months, which sounds about right. Her expressive speech is around 18 months. That puts her about 9 months behind... a little depressing but about right. Abby's gross motor skills came in at a very depressing 15 months. I know that number is right nut knowing she is A YEAR BEHIND where she should be is hard to digest. This plateau she has hit has been a long one. I just hope that something can come out of this meeting so the gap doesn't keep getting wider and wider.