My oldest son is sitting in bed with me watching Bambi while we settle in for the night. We come in here as soon as I put my youngest to sleep to ensure we stay quiet enough for him to hopefully drift off to baby dreamland. He has been doing pretty well sleeping in his crib and in his own room during the past few weeks and I am so thankful. With my husband now working nights, evenings are hard.
We are at the part of the movie where Thumper teaches Bambi to talk by starting with the word “Bird”. My son loves to imitate movies and this is his favorite part. He tries his hardest to say “Bird” just like thumper is teaching Bambi, and I love it because it is a beloved character teaching him how to break up a word into individual sounds, which is what we do too. “BIR-Da” he yells as he jumps up in exclamation! He is so precise with his imitations of movies, I call him my little actor.
Max actually has a speech delay… mixed Receptive Expressive Delay to be exact. His expressive is in the >1% for his age. He has about 10 words down and that is just in the past month or so. His words aren’t full words either, usually the first or last sound of the word mixed with additional sounds. But he really has come so far! It has been a long journey with his speech and we sure aren’t done yet.
Our Developmental and Speech Services
Max has been in Speech Therapy through our medical insurance since just after he turned 2. June – December 2019 we went weekly to Speech therapy and while there was new things he was learning, he hadn’t had much growth in his language development. In the beginning we concentrated a lot on implementing sign language words with him, maybe one new sign per week just about. He had about 10 sign language words down pat that he used on a regular basis. Other than signs, we did a lot of hand gestures near our mouth to show him how to make certain sounds and draw attention to our mouths while also giving him a gesture to imitate. I learned a lot of this from his SLP (Speech and Language Pathologist) and used it all the time at home. Max barely had 2 sounds he could say and his only words were “mama” and “dada” for the longest time. One of my biggest concerns was that he wouldn’t even try to imitate us when we tried to get him to say a word or sound. We praised every sound he did manage to make and every sign he used, hoping to encourage him. We paired the sign language with the first sound of the word and that did help improve his ability to say a couple of sounds. Overall, it seemed like slow progress.
During this time, I also looked into what other services Max might be able to qualify for to help him with his severe speech delay. I reached out to Inland Regional Center in August of 2019, after a thorough evaluation process, we started with Early Intervention Services in September. I was thrilled to be effectively advocating for my son. I have helped so many other families in my line of work, advocate for themselves and acquire necessary support services, I was sure this would be a breeze… what I didn’t realize is when it is your own child you are advocating for, it is so much more of an emotional process and so much paperwork, evaluations, phone calls and meetings etc. I don’t think this will ease up anytime soon either!
The early intervention services which were contracted through IRC entailed a “teacher” coming to our home 2 times per week to work with Max and show me how I should be working with him to help with his developmental delays. Besides his speech, IRC determined that Max was also delayed in his “adaptive / self-help” category as well. So this meant he wasn’t where he should be with eating, dressing, bathing etc. The services in place were intended to help with these tasks, although as you will see in a separate post about our early intervention experience, I did not really find these sessions useful or insightful and felt they could definitely be improved upon.
Now, I have to remind you that I am a Full Time working mom and at this point I had Speech Therapy once per week and now had to add on Early Intervention sessions twice a week for one hour each session. Luckily, my current position is flexible and I am able to work from home some days, however, for anyone needing to fulfill 3 days of appointments per week, it can be exhausting and unmanageable! Eventually I had to switch teachers and schedule evening sessions with EI, so it didn’t start to affect my work balance. While I was thankful for the evening sessions, it unfortunately also created another stressor at home. It was just another thing for me to schedule and manage after work and in between dinner, baths and bedtimes, but I manage. I do not want to deny any services for my son that may be helpful in the long run, so I stick with it, and will until services end when he turns 3. I will be going more in depth with how I manage this particular type of work/life balance in another post soon.
As of now, Max is almost 3 and will soon be exiting out of his EI services through IRC. Since December 2019 we have been in the process of enrolling and evaluating him for the school District’s developmental preschool and creating an IEP for him. This entire process I will explain more in depth on a separate post as well, just because there has been so many steps to this process. Max has his second School Psychologist Eval coming up and it seems as if she (and others) have noticed that he may be on the Autism Spectrum (ASD). He also has his Autism and developmental evaluation through our Doctors office next week. So very soon we will have a more clear picture of his needs and the services we should be setting up for him.
Since we have experienced a lot with his Developmental journey so far, and still have a ways to go, I thought it would be good to track our experience and progress. Maybe writing about our journey will be helpful to someone one day, maybe Max will enjoy being able to see all his progress and maybe I will look back and feel very proud of everything I did to ensure he had the tools he needed to be successful. Either way, here we go, continuing on this journey… so say it with me… “BIRD”.
Flying by the Seat of My Mom Jeans 