Eating her lunch after our appointment.
Well, according to the folks at Child Find, that is her developmental age. We just got back from her evaluation, and yes, I agree with them, Amanda is very delayed, she can crawl and sit up, so she does have motor skills that are beyond 4 months, but in everything else, yes, she is very much like a tiny infant.
After much discussion, I admitted to the very nice staff (An OT, OT, ST, nurse, and psychologist) that I do not feel it is prudent to send Amanda to school in January. She is making tiny steps towards attaching to us, but sending her to a school now would just confuse and scare her. The psychiatrist agreed with me, we should wait until she has been home a year before sending her to school.
We discussed sending her to the Myers-Ganoung Project Able because they have children with profound special needs in the classroom, and they feel she would fit in better there. I do not like the idea and this is my issue with it; I am of the mind that if you want a child to model peers, putting them with children with severe delay (most more delayed than themselves), that they would not progress and could perhaps regress as they model the behavior and mobility of the children they are with. This was the reasoning we used when we placed Meghan in fully included Kindergarten. We could see that she wanted to be like the children she spent her day with in her project able, most only there for slight speech delay.
Amanda came out kind of yellow in the original of this picture, so I did a color correction, check out her eyes, LOL, they are grey blue normally. :o)
Amanda came out kind of yellow in the original of this picture, so I did a color correction, check out her eyes, LOL, they are grey blue normally. :o)I am happy to say that for the very first time since we came home with her, Amanda sat in the tub and did not cry in terror. She even splashed and actually enjoyed herself!
Small but very rewarding steps.
4 comments:
Glad things are going so well for Amanda. I would not send her to school yet either.
I also agree with you that she needs to be with kids that are not like her in developement so she can go forward not backwards.
She is getting prettier each time you post. I'm with you on the peer modeling. I think the least restrictive environment is best.
I'm glad she had a good bath!! She's so cute!
Glad to hear you were able to get an eval done! We just had those same conversations with our evaluation team but I am definitely surprised that they came up with a 4 month level for Amanda. Just from videos and things from your blog especially her gross motor skills and eating, etc. I'd put her at a higher level, though yes, delayed. For instance, Emma scored at 9 months and of course is much more delayed than Amanda. A 9 month old isn't exactly doing much LOL Anyway, I'm glad you're keeping her home as she seems to be making amazing strides in attachment but still needs time! Emma will be home until next August too which will be almost 18 months for her to be home. I also agree that a profound class wouldn't be appropriate for Amanda. She needs to be in with kids that are going to help her strive to reach the next goal not ones that she'll model negative or 'younger' behaviors from. We had the recommendation made against the profound class by the psychologist that just "happened to sit in" on our IEP meeting with Emma. Where there is potential and when the child wasn't raised in a therapeutic atmosphere the profound classes are NOT appropriate! That counts out all of our int'l adopted kiddos!
So glad to see her happy in the tub! Can't wait to see cute tub pic's of all three girls splashing and playing together :)
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