The Worst Feeling
Some of you know that I’ve been a bit concerned about Isaiah and his general lack of desire to be a true member of my family. By that I mean that he’s not really interested in chatting. And if you know anyone in my family, you know that talking is second nature to us all. I know what you’re thinking. Jose’s not much of a chatter though. And those of you who mistakenly have that idea let me just say you have never seen Jose sit on the phone for 2 hours talking to his sister or brother about god only knows what. It’s enough to make you jealous if you were the jealous type.
Anyway, we looked around and found out about First Steps a program that provides free evaluations and cheap intervention for kids aged 0 to 3 years. So, I signed Isaiah up. And today, I got a copy of his evaluation report. And let me just say that I don’t much care for reading those reports. Although I wanted Isaiah to qualify for services. And although I feel that he really needs to receive speech/language therapy there is nothing relieving in reading a report that says your child has a moderate to severe delay in anything. I found myself arguing with parts of the report. “Sure Isaiah does that.” And “of course he doesn’t know his body parts, we haven’t even bothered to teach them.” It’s a bad parent moment all written up and presented double-spaced and most likely in triplicate.
Needless to say that Isaiah qualified for services. And my mental conversation is that it’s just as well that they scored him so low (notice that he didn’t score lowly surely it’s the evaluator’s fault that she wasn’t able to see everything that he could do…sigh) because now he’ll just look like a child genius when they reevaluate in 6 months. The bright side of the report is that he is smart – his cognitive abilities were fine. He just apparently doesn’t understand anything you say or feel compelled to let you know what he wants or thinks. And further more, I don’t think the fact that he’s not scared to jump off the table into Jose’s lap (a game we play all the time) means that he doesn’t understand what danger is. The evaluator has never seen him walk very carefully on the wet kitchen floor so that he doesn’t fall down and bust is butt, but good. It’s a lesson that he learned pretty early. Tell me my child doesn’t know what danger is… shoot! Nor has she seen Isaiah physically put your hand on his sippy cup and then do a Lassie impersonation (running to the door and looking back while sticking his hand out toward the kitchen) to get me off my fat butt and get him something to drink. What do they know!
The good news is he qualifies for services at only $20 per month – so hopefully whatever is wrong will be taken care of by the time he gets to kindergarten. I’d sure like to have several proud parent moments with my youngest son as well.
