Beat the System

Finally, the system works. At least it did today, in my favor (well, Lydia's favor). Let me refresh....Lydia was a First Steps baby. She had low muscle tone and development delays which led to speech delays and so forth. She exited the program when she was three with no further services required - supposedly, she was caught up and age appropriate in all her skill levels. Fine.

Well, last year at age 3 and a half, we started to see her speech fall behind, again. Her preschool teacher brought it up in her first and second semester conference and together, we decided to wait and have Lydia tested further until after her fourth birthday. Why? Well, the expectations for your speech go up after you're four. I finally managed to get her tested today. She's 4 and 7 months.

The speech evaluator was great! She had asked me what my concerns were and I told her. Lydia can't do "f"s, she has trouble with "v", "w", "s", "d", and other sounds. Mostly, though, she is hard to understand a lot of the time. It's not a whole sentence you can't understand, but particular words and phrases. Her mouth gets lazy and doesn't want to annunciate.

She agreed with me after evaluating her and particularly was concerned about her "f" sounds. YEAH! She's going to recommend speech services once a week for her at Vandover (ECC) and that will get Lydia an IEP to take to Kindergarten which will hopefully mean, more speech services.

I was pretty adamant that she get tested before her kindergarten screening so that when they see her, we already have a plan in place, plus I wanted her to start services before school starts for several reasons. First, if she can make any progress before the Fall - it will only help her with her peers. If they can't understand her - well, kids can be cruel. Second, I want her to have a base to jump off of when she gets to "big kid" school. She won't think it's weird to go to speech because she's already doing it.

When I told Lydia that she was going to be taking a special class at her "old" preschool this semester, she only replied, "Okay, but can I still go to Kindergarten?" - How sweet is that!? I said, "of course!" and that was all it took. She's okay with it. Me? I'm elated.

I feel like I beat the system and that makes me one happy woman. It is a shame to know that you have to let your kid get "worse" before then can get services to get "better", but you have to play by the rules (sort of), to get what you need. Next up - William.

In a few months, we'll see how he's doing when he "exits" the First Steps program, or qualifies for further services. He will probably fall in the very broad range of normal, on the lower end, and not make the cut off for services, but we can only hope. Maybe he'll have a bad day and not perform for them - which means he'll score lower. Okay, so am I actually considering interrupting his sleep so he's a crabby mess and sleep deprivation never scores well? NO! JUST KIDDING! I wouldn't do that - would I? Hmmmm. Something to think about......ha ha!