Wednesday, November 9

Annual Update

Ok, okay so I update just more regularly than annually - just more.

So often, in fact, that I hardly know where to begin. Let's start with we saw Dr. Fasci, the nuero. pediatric developmental specialist, who we loved. She spent a great deal of time with Bryce. She made some very real assessments of his ability and was such an amazing enabler to my Bryce-advocacy that I almost forgot she wasn't his mom.

We learned that the school year doesn't just "end" for summer - that there is such thing as the extended school year. And that Bryce should qualify though the laws are sketchy and the motives for the staff to be in school over summer even more so. Wouldn't be a big deal if his current therapies weren't state mandated to end the first business day after Bryce's 3rd birthday. Which just so happens to be in the "summer off" of the school year. So there is a good chance that we'll get Bryce into the extended school year early learning environment, where he will get the majority of his therapies. I plan to volunteer for as much in the program as possible so as to be a bystander of his curriculum. Shortly after dealing with this hurdle, I'm sure we'll have another to leap as he graduates (or the district wants him to) to kindergarten.

Back to present day reality; Dr. Fasci, after repeated prodding, finally conceded that the bare minimum therapy for Bryce would be each discipline once weekly. He gets much more than that now but self pay is somewhere in the range of $100/visit. And Dr. Fasci believes that his current schedule of weekly PT, bi-weekly OT and Early Intervention with bi-monthly Nutrition is getting the job done. Her main concern was Bryce's speech/language skills. Bryce WAS getting speech therapy bi-monthly but her recommendation was twice per week sessions.

All this therapy is trying and time consuming but we forge ahead and hope for the best.

Never mind ECI (the state therapy provider) not following that "twice per week model" or school of thought they have increased speech therapy to weekly. That's twice as much speech therapy and we're already starting to see results.

Of course, we may or may not be supplementing with private speech therapy. That's a subject for a whole other post, perhaps a password protected post of the privileged nature.

Whatever the case may be, Bryce said "up" to me more times today than I can count on both hands. And that is huge for our little 29 month old , former 24 weeker, preemie.

That's all for tonight, folks. I'll try to get back to the update ASAP.

xoxo!