OT Eval

Today was Joshua's occupational therapy evaluation. It went as well as I expected I suppose. Our therapist is named Ms. Mindy. She seems nice for the most part. We arrived early and I filled out the necessary paperwork as well as gave them copies of the hearing test and psychological eval. Not long after Ms. Mindy came out to get us.

We went through the large therapy room and into a smaller room that had a view of the traffic crossing the bridge outside at high speeds. Not the best choice for a child that is easily distracted. LOL After going through the paperwork I had filled out and taking notes from what I described, she asked about whether he has been in day care or school. I told her no and that I was homeschooling him this year. She decided to tell me that sometimes for these kids it is better to have them in a social environment and that we will talk more about it at the end and to think about it. At this point, she had to go and get her eval kit in another room, and I looked at Silas and said, "Sure, I'm going to send my autistic child to school to be social where he will likely be told NOT to socialize for the majority of the day. Makes perfect sense to me!" Ms. G. has told me numerous times that because of the number and ages of my kids, we in sense have a peer group that allows us plenty of social interaction. We also are doing the socialization classes. At the very end of the therapy eval, I did let Mindy know this, and she made a note and suddenly thought that homeschooling wasn't a totally off the wall idea now.

Anyhow, I missed a good deal of the actual evaluation because I was having to fill out yet more paperwork, this time on his sensory issues. Silas was there though, so he kept watch for me. She had Joshua perform many tasks. He had to string beads onto a string, lace something up, stack blocks, arrange blocks into patterns, do a wooden puzzle, cut paper using scissors and draw pictures (neither of those went well), drop small beads into a small container and then screw the lid on the bottle (couldn't screw on the lid), and a couple of other tasks that are slipping my mind right now.

After this, Joshua was rewarded by being allowed to choose a truck to play with. Mindy brought him to the area where they are kept. They were gone very briefl, maybe 45 seconds tops going to the area to the truck area and then back again, and he took the first one he could get to. He came back smiling and had a ball playing. About 10 minutes later, he turned to Mindy and asked her if she wanted to play with the Elmo truck. I had no idea what he was talking about because his truck was green. Then he asked about 4 other various trucks. Turns out, in that extremely brief amount of time he was in the area where the trucks were, he had eyed and memorized what each one of the trucks looked like. LOL It was neat to see how he took that in so quickly.

Mindy then went through the sensory issue paperwork and told us that he appears to have issues with all of the sensory processing areas they test for. She said he will never completely get over all of these, but he will learn how to adapt and hopefully it will eventually allow him to not have so many meltdowns when there is a slight change in schedule. She is going to put him on what they call a "complete sensory diet". We will be given certain times of the day to do certain sensory activities and the object is to try and not have him have so many ups and downs with the activity and behaviors. One example of the activities she gave was after breakfast he might jump on the bed! He's gonna love that! LOL

He will go in once a week for a 30 minute session and it is set to begin week after next. Next Tuesday will be his socialization class followed immediately by his speech eval. Say some prayers that it will go smoothly!