Nick's Speech Therapy Progress

I had a dream last night that Nick was talking.  He said,”Hi, there,” plus a few other words.  I’m hopeful that dream comes true soon.  I’m waiting for the day I hear him say, “Mama”. 

We met with the school district last week, since they will be taking over for the Regional Center once Nick turns 3, in another month.  The good news is that they declared he was not eligible for autistic services — meaning no worries about autism.  They have deemed him developmentally delayed, though, and put his developmental age at between 18 to 24 months.  In addition to not speaking, he also does not grasp certain concepts such as big and little and needs a little work with his fine motor skills.  They’ve determined that he will be going to school 4 days a week for 2 1/2 hours and will also receive a half hour each week to work with a specialist in fine motor skills.  They’ve set goals for him to accomplish, such as cutting with scissors (we’ve never let him touch those before, so it didn’t surprise me at all that he didn’t know what to do with them) and speaking several words.  They expect to see some type of progress around October. 

The good news is that the developmental specialist and speech therapist working with Nick have both noticed progress.  They have gotten him to mimic them more often, which they say is the beginning step in acquiring speech.  He’s also saying a bigger variety of sounds.  I actually thought he was about to say, “Mama” the other night, but of course, just as he was starting to verbalize the sounds, Chase walked into the room and distracted him  .

So now I’ve got 2 kids having their first day of school this year.  Chase will be entering Kindergarten and now Nick will be going to preschool.  Didn’t quite expect that.  My babies are growing up.  That’s so unfair!

And speaking of growing up, we took Felicity shoe shopping to get her shoes for school this year.  Yeah, guess who’s wearing the same size as me?  Uh huh.  (Of course, we bought them just a little bit bigger for her to grow into, but not that much bigger.)  In another year or two, I’m expecting her to start  borrowing my shoes.