Lexi had her EI eval yesterday morning. I was nervous to say the least. I was afraid they were going to tell me I was royally screwing up my child and she should be stripped from my care. Well, not really...but you get the point.
First off, the DT and ST were late. So this didn't start things off well with me. I'm a punctual person...and if I'm going to be late, I call. They were 15 minutes late and didn't call, so I was not happy to start with. But they were REALLY nice. They sat on the floor in our family room and basically played with Lexi, while asking me and my mom (my mom was there as well since she watches Lexi 4 days a week) questions about my pregnancy, Lexi's birth, her health, her daily habits etc.
They marveled at how open she was with them...willingly going up to them to play and do the things they were asking. They kept asking me if she was always this easy going...my answer was obviously yes, she is. And it's true...Lexi is very social and loves other people and kids. It might take her a minute or so to warm up, but then she's off!
As for the actual evaluation...I'll post more when I get the detailed report, but a short version:
They graded her based on an adjusted age of 18 months (because she was a month early) and she only scored at a 12 month level for verbal skills...which qualifies her for speech therapy services. While I'm not happy about her score, I'm thrilled that she qualified for services. I know she will only benefit from them, and I would hate to NOT have her qualify and have to wait for her to fall further behind (she's only a 33% delay and they need a 30% delay to qualify) before she could get assistance.
HOWEVER...she scored consistently at a 21 or 22 month level for her receptive language as well as ALL her developmental skills. I always said she was a smart cookie! Some of the tasks that they asked her to do, they preceded with "We don't expect her to be able to do this yet, but we'll try...", and she mastered them! Which actually surprised both the DT and ST. Lexi was able to identify both pictures of nouns (which one is the ball?) AND verbs (which one is sleeping?). I'm told the identification of the verbs is way above her age.
Anyway, that was my day yesterday. I'm VERY happy about being able to get her the assistance she needs now. The ST actually thinks she may only need a month or two of weekly sessions and she'll be all caught up!
4 comments:
That's great news! My son was slow to develop his productive language, too, and we were a few weeks or months from an evaluation, but we did hearing checks first and found he couldn't hear much because of fluids on the eardrum (=tubes in the ears). That has made all the difference for us, and he is a regular chatterbox now. Hope this will do the trick for Lexi.
If she's ahead in all her developmental skills, couldn't she just be a late bloomer talker?
that is wonderful!! I put my son into therapy for speech mostly due to the tantrums he was having. After a year, he's perfect (ok, not really, but he is where he should be). It certainly wont hurt. And I feel it's better to start now than wait until they are in kindergarten.
I've just shared this post on our Facebook fan page to inspire other mothers/fathers/caregivers.
Thank you.
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