Ava's new room

This past week we've significantly rearranged Ava's room. Her room is small, and the children would rarely play in there because the room felt cramped. She did, however, have one of those long shallow closets with sliding doors. We came up with the idea of taking the doors off and moving her toddler bed into the closet.

Well, it gave us more space, but it looked awful.

So, I decided that we could try hanging curtains around it to hide the storage and edges of the closet. We went to a fabric store and chose some material and got 10 yards of two different types. One was pink and satiny and the other was a tutu type material (not sure what it was called actually) with pretty sparkles. I just hemmed all the edges and we called them curtains.

We bought and installed a curtain rod and then tossed the curtains up and it's better. Ava loves it. Now it does look like a pink princess went a little overboard in her room, but I can live with it. (Ok, that made it sound easy, but I am obviously completely uneducated on how to hang curtains, because achieving that look was extremely difficult and my husband did most of the work.)

This is what her room looks like now. Everyone is enjoying the refresh and I've noticed the children spending a lot more time playing in there.

It's Coming and I Don't Have a Good Feeling About It

Our evaluation by the school district is coming up in a little over two weeks. Thursday they will send someone to observe her at school. Then two weeks later I bring her in for a morning of testing. I just don't think she'll qualify for further services.

She's doing so well. The occupational therapy has been nothing short of a miracle. She's trying new foods, tolerating stimulating environments, touching a wide variety of things without too much protest, and playing more with others. It is amazing and I am in awe at the transformative powers of occupational therapy. I'm not sure she needs much more OT.

Her speech is still full of errors, but her language is fine. Her teacher is just an amazing teacher and has a lot of experience with little ones and so doesn't have a lot of trouble understanding her at school. Most of what she has to say at school has a lot of context to help out. Her intelligibility is aided by her good coping skills. She will often try another way when her first attempt at communicating is unsuccessful. She also has good inflection, facial expressions and body language which helps boost her intelligibility. All of that is wonderful, but is going to work against her during this assessment. I suspect they will not qualify a child who isn't even three yet based on the presence of speech errors alone.

We'll just go and see what happens. But I'm not getting my hopes up.

Speech Therapy Update: Speech vs. Language

We saw Ms. J for therapy yesterday. It was the first time in about three months. Ms. J had some issues with her office space and wasn't seeing clients for a while and then we had some scheduling conflicts. It is amazing how time can just slip away.

Three months is a long time at this age. Ms. J was amazed at Ava's language. She's talking in full sentences. For her age, her sentences are complex and she is also doing well with grammar. To be honest, even when she had no words, I wan't super concerned about her language skills. She always understood exactly what was being said around her and was managing to be pretty expressive through body language and other non-verbal communication. Now that she's talking she has a lot to say.

Her speech, on the other hand, hasn't progressed a lot. After working with her for an hour, we were sent home working on mostly the same things. We're still working on that final /k/ sound. I think I hate /k/. Never once, did I imagine working on the same sound for months and months and months on end. However, I should note that it is finally coming in. It is guttural, but with prompting and multiple cues we can get a back sound instead of a front one. So now we're going to try to stimulate /k/ in medial and front positions as well.

So, in summary, language is great, intelligibility is moderate (pretty good in context to a familiar listener, but iffy under other circumstances), and speech is still our biggest area of concern.