Ronan had a follow-up evaluation yesterday. It has been 6 months since his first evaluation, and the county department wanted to find out if we’d been seeing progress with his speech therapy.
Ronan gets therapy twice a week, which is relatively unheard of, and what they really wanted was to find a reason to bring him down to one session a week.
Ronan had his first evaluation in April of this year. He was 26 months old. He had delays across the board, although his speech was definitely the most affected. At 26 months old, Ronan’s evaluation looked like this:
Gross Motor Skills: 20 months
Fine Motor Skills : 20 months
Self Help Ability: 20 months
Social/Emotional Skills: 24 months
Speech/Communication: 12 months
As you can see, Ronan was more than a year behind in verbal communication. He has been receiving speech therapy for nearly six months now, with a one month break in services because we moved to a different county.
Yesterday, at 33 months old, his evaluation looked like this:
Gross Motor Skills: 30 months
Fine Motor Skills: Age appropriate (33 months)
Self Help Ability: 30 months
Social/Emotional Skills: 30 months
Speech/Communication: 24 months
The evaluator, when she was giving us this information, seemed very guarded. She seemed to feel like she was telling us awful news. And yes, it is sort of awful to hear that your child has such a broad array of delays.
However.
However… we were thrilled. Ronan went from an 18 month speech deficit to a 12 month deficit in 6 months? He closed the gap in his delay by 6 whole months. Sure, he hasn’t caught up yet. But catching up isn’t what we expect; it’s not the way apraxia works. What we’ve seen is HUGE progress in a short period of time.
We know that this is going to take a long time. We know that we have a very long road ahead of us in all areas. But it feels AMAZING to see how far he has come in such a short time, thanks to Miss Emily, our incredible speech therapist, and the ways she’s helped us teach Ronan to grow.
It’s going to be hard work. But he is so worth it. And we are so, so lucky.
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Please excuse any and all errors in this post. It’s late, I’m tired…and I’m not proofreading before bed. Boom.
