Speech Evaluation and Final Worker/Child Visit!

Steven has been receiving early intervention services through Rainbows since he was two months old due to his traumatic birth.  We were first assigned a wonderful early childhood intervention teacher whom worked really well with us and we kept a pretty consistent scheduled.  We also saw a physical therapist a couple of times a week, but earlier this year, Steven's developmental pediatrician wanted him receiving weekly physical therapy that Rainbows was unable to provide due to their staffing and budget issues.  Because of Steven's doctor, we began doing weekly physical therapy at the hospital, while continuing to see the physical therapist from Rainbows in the home twice a month.

When we began transitioning Steven to table food, he had a really bad aversion to textures.  So the early childhood teacher had a couple of different speech therapists come with her to try and help us with that issue.  After a couple of months, we learned that Rainbows was having more layoffs and they were moving staff around to different areas, so we would be losing our early childhood intervention teacher and due to the fact that Steven was still having so much difficulty transitioning to table food and was not talking, they made our primary contact a speech therapist.  I had worked with this therapist before with one of our other foster kiddos, so we were familiar with each other.

Due to the limited number of days that the therapists and teachers can work in a given year and then the week we were on vacation, we went almost two months without seeing the speech therapist.  When I took Steven to his 18-month well child check, I expressed my concern to his pediatrician about how he was still not talking, still having some difficulty with table foods and the fact that we weren't receiving consistent services through Rainbows.  I told her that Steven was finally on our insurance since the adoption process was finally moving forward and I wanted him in weekly speech therapy.  She agreed and set up the evaluation.

As I had gone through so many times before, we sat down at the evaluation and went through the developmental checklists to see exactly where Steven's developmental stood.  In all areas he has met at least one of the developmental skills in the 12 to 15 month and 15 to 18 month area.  In most areas he had solidly met the 9-12 month skills.  However, in one area he had only met every single developmental skill in the 6 to 9 month area.  So within the next couple of weeks we will be adding weekly speech therapy to our routine.  When we go tomorrow for his physical therapy appointment, I'll be trying to arrange it so that we can do both appointments on the same day, to avoid having to make two trips to the hospital weekly.

Yesterday we had our LAST worker/child visit required by the State for children in state's custody.  I also got word from our attorney's secretary that the Decree of Adoption and Adoption Record are complete and ready to go for September 8th when we have our adoption hearing scheduled!!!!  Nine more days and it will be official!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!