Joshua had a busy day yesterday...the first of many it sounds. I didn't get to go to his class and eval yesterday because our little Elena has been fighting a horrible stomach bug that almost landed her in the hospital. Yuck! I was waiting for some lab results and unfortunately, I had to choose what info to get straight from the horse's mouth and who to let my husband talk to. LOL
Anyway, Josh started with his socialization class. My husband took him and things started out pretty well. The elevators we normally use appeared to have some issues and no one seemed to know where the stairs were. So, a nice security guard took Josh and N (one of his classmates) to the staff elevator. Instead of having a meltdown from the change in routine, Josh actually thought it was pretty cool. They went to class and Mrs. G. said he did really well. We are supposed to work on reading emotions and facial expressions this week. I happened upon a neat little internet feelings game I am going to try with him tonight, found here.
After the socialization class, they went across the hall to meet the speech therapist who would be doing his evaluation. Silas described how it went, and honestly, I was expecting to hear a dreadfully awful score. She promised to call me today and let me know how it went.
Well, the results are in and not nearly as bad as I thought they may turn out. I now remember why I never send Silas to the doctor with the kids. LOL He came home and told me that it is an older woman therapist and I didn't think it is who we were originally scheduled to be with. He said that she didn't lose her temper or anything, but she did have to try redirecting a lot and also appeared to be getting a little flustered with him. That kind of worried me. I *thought* we were getting someone who was good with Autistic kids and was the therapist recommended by the psychologist. In the end, she told Silas exactly what our pshychologist's report (which they have a copy of but did not look at) said...he needs help with expressive language. I feel like we are going in circles sometimes.
Silas told me that she said his comprehension skills are fine but she has trouble getting him to respond so it makes it difficult. She claims he doesn't say 4 word sentences - if I had been there I would have made sure I let her know that is far from the case! She asked him things like "An apple is red, a banana is what?" and he answered yellow. However, he didn't answer three questions in a set so it counts as a problem. She asked him hypothetical questions like "Your hands are dirty, what do you need to do?" Silas said he looked at his hands and then said "My hands aren't dirty". LOL (BTW, notice that right there is a 4 word sentence!) There were some other things in there as well. Really, we learned nothing we didn't already know, which is plain annoying at this point. Nothing like paying $82 to hear what we already were told back in February!
So, after reading that, imagine my surprise when the therapist called and sounded very nice. LOL She said she is really looking forward to working with Joshua, he's a really neat kid, really cute, has very interesting comments, and he has a lot of positive things going for him. :)
Joshua is 4 years, 8 months old. For understanding skills she has him as scoring 81 which is in the 10th percentile for his age. She said she feels he probably knows a lot more than she could get though. Anyway, that has his understanding at an age of 3 years, 9 months, or about a year behind. She also evaluated his expressive language (which we have known he was behind in). He scored a 70 which means he is in the 2nd percentile and significantly behind. So those skills are at a 3 year, 3 month level. His overall score was a 73 and put him at 3 years, 5 months for his total speech. Not great, but a whole lot better than I was thinking it may be at given Silas' report.
I asked her if Silas had mentioned he is Autistic, and she said yes, and she reassured me that this is indeed nothing I did wrong but something that is very common with Autistic children. The she made me laugh...she said he has a lot of Autistic traits that were very noticable, but he was great with initiating conversations and made really good eye contact. This is amazing to me! He has had 11 socialization classes, and in that short amount of time, he has started to improve, even with strangers, in both those areas! You have no idea how exciting this is to me!!! True, it still isn't consistant, but goodness, it is a major improvement since just February!
Anyhow, she went over all of the goals with me that she had gone over with Silas yesterday and then she had me choose which ones I wanted her to work on first and what would be most beneficial for us in our home and in our working with him. After he meets one, they'll add another. :) She also mentioned that she wanted to see him twice a week. I told her I wished we could do that, and even though we are part of their assistance program which allows us to make a $25 co-pay each time, there is no way we can afford ST twice a week on top of the OT fully out of pocket and $25 each socialization class. She said she understood and that once a week would be fine and she would give him lots of homework. I told her she could load us with tons of homework if she wanted because I was homeschooling him and would easily be able to make it a part of his schoolwork. She seemed very happy to hear that.
So, we start next week on the same day we start OT. :) Ms. K, the receptionist for the therapy office is awesome, and she even managed to get all of our scheduled OT and ST appointments scheduled for the same days and with very little gaps of time in between, if any at all! Should be interesting to say the least! I am really looking forward to seeing the progress he will make once all of this starts!
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