That is me on the bus right now. I'm listening to my gym list on my phone and pounding this out as fast as I can before I get A-Man from daycare. The rest will probably get typed up while I'm waiting (forever) for them to fall asleep.
Today we had one of those meeting where only the dogs and the kids were missing. It was about the A-Man's progress and this meeting had been booked at least 4 months ago.
The psychologist was there, two of his teachers and his new speech therapist.
Fun times.
We went over as much as we could cram into 1.5 hours. After 1 hour I'm exhausted but we truck into new territory.
M-Girl.
Of course they ask how things are at home and how the kids interact (or don't) with each other.
(Fast forward to the next day because I went on a Modern Family season 6 binge session and sobbed my head off and am currently at the gym.)
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| Who knew cycling would be an excellent spot to blog?! |
"Ok but how is her speech?"
Hubster and I stare at each other and it clicks.
She is 2 and doesn't speak in sentences with the (her sized) handful consisting of:
"Come on! Let's go! Hurry- she's coming!"
So maximum three word sentences. And that's about all of it.
We then realized that we don't really "talk" or I should say that we don't encourage her to talk a lot (manners and saying what she wants aside).
We aren't telling her to be quiet but we haven't actually sat down with her and tried to get her to say her alphabet or numbers or to repeat words with us.
I guess when you have two kids with speech problems you kind of forget that the other child might have something and in our case, she can say single words and had gotten by just fine under the radar. Because she can speak -just not in question or sentence formats.
Even as a baby this was common- her flying under the radar because she rarely woke up crying. She talked and wiggled. That was it!
While her motor skills seem to be on par (she was a very early walker)- she also feels minimal pain when hurting herself (some tears are shed then she moves on) and often goes back to doing whatever it was that caused her lump on her head!
It's not that we ignore her whatsoever - but we've been so focused on making sure that V-Man isn't trying to escape/feed the dogs un-necessary amounts of extra food - never mind all the other stuff he's up to lately (i.e. emptying cupboards and emptying spice jars/boxes) and also trying to encourage the A-Man to speak more as well - that we forget perhaps she needs help too.
Anyways, I have tried to hold my shit together (so to speak) and saved my tears for last night.
Pretty much they're concerned and they suggested strongly to get her daycare staff to forward a request to get her tested- depending on how well she speaks Finnish at daycare. So all I can do is hope that the Hubster remembers to ask and then wait.
According to their language assessment of the A-Man- he's improving. Based on Finnish when he first started back in August- he scored a 23/60 points. It's a huge check list of things that include understanding, reading, writing and speaking.
He's recently been evaluated again and scored 32/60- so a big improvement in half a year.
This test was done by a teacher with several years of special needs education under her belt- and in English he did much better.
So I do trust their results and evaluation and am glad they do it and tell us after the fact- less stress I guess!
As an update, M-Girl's daycare teachers are not worried at all about her Finnish skills because she is able to express what she wants and understands what she's being told.
So far, that is a relief - but you can see my worry!
We'll keep an eye on her and see how it goes from there and in the mean time, I am trying to have one-on-one read & repeat sessions with her and we're digging out the communication board for her to utilize.
Because a sentence is a huge verbal commitment for a child that has gotten away with not really using any - and if she can at least point to what she wants in a sentence structure and say some of the words - then we can build on sentences from there!
BIMU
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