Chit Chat
I can’t remember exactly what I’ve posted regarding Charlotte’s speech development, but between the ear tubes post and whatnot, I’m pretty sure I’ve covered that (1) Charlotte has spent the majority of her childhood with fluid-filled ears, (2) her speech development has been markedly delayed, (3) a hearing test confirmed hearing impairment, (3) she got tubes put in her ears, (4) another hearing test confirmed that HOORAY! her hearing now registers as completely normal, (5) her speech has been improving quite a bit since April 5th (since the tubes were put in), so (6) doing the ear tubes was DEFINITELY the right move.
The next loooooong step was determining her need for speech therapy. Oy.
Fortunately, one of my very good friends, Meghan, happens to have a mum who is a speech therapist in the SF Bay Area. So, we coordinated our West Coast vs. East Coast schedules and had a lovely phone call together, and she told Chris and me everything we needed to know. She was incredibly helpful, and it was such a relief to get the insider perspective of how everything works and what we should do.
We decided to pursue public (county-provided) therapy for Charlotte first, because those therapists will go directly to the child’s “natural environment,” which meant they’d do therapy at Charlotte’s school—scoring major points for this full-time working mum (but not without first reprimanding you for your lack of parental involvement, I since learned). Additionally, Charlotte’s school is very used to working with the county therapists and assured me that they could easily accommodate whatever at-school therapy Charlotte might need. So, I jumped through the first several hoops, which mainly involved lots of phone calls and reiterating over and over again Charlotte’s story thus far.
Eventually, we got scheduled for a 2-hour “intake” at our house, in which the “early intervention specialist” (who apparently is a specialist in obtaining paperwork and parent signatures and recording answers to parent-report assessments) explained precisely how bureaucratic public early intervention is and “observed” Charlotte, which mostly amounted to asking me, “Should Charlotte be coloring on the walls?” (In my defense, I was busy filling out all her effing paperwork, plus Charlotte’s markers are those “wonder” markers that only mark on special paper.) The specialist was very nice, and even used the line “I get it—I’m a working mom too,” which scored a point, but this took out a huge chunk of our day and accomplished pretty much nil.
A week or two later, the gazillionth representative from the county called me, informing me that Charlotte’s evaluation would take place at our house the following morning at 10:00 a.m. I told her that one day was not enough notice, and even if it was, 10:00 a.m. is the equivalent of being right smack in the middle of our day, seeing as how I’d still have to get Charlotte to school (hopefully before lunch and nap!) and myself to work quite far away from our house. Besides, I had been gone the week before in Indianapolis and needed to be in my actual OFFICE for a bit. You know, to earn the salary that pays the taxes that fund such programs as THIS one. (Well, I left that last part out, but you get the idea . . .)
The rep was fairly nice about my refusal to schedule the evaluation and said she’d convene with her team and discuss a time the following week—and then she’d let me know when it was scheduled for. (Don’t you LOVE the lack of control you have when dealing with government programs?)
I said fine, hung up, and immediately called Chris. I secured his blessing to pull Charlotte out of the county program. I had had so many conversations and had put in so much time up to this point, and Charlotte STILL hadn’t been evaluated (and I had been informed that it may or may NOT be an actual speech therapist who would do the speech evaluation—I’m not sure that’s even legal). It was possible that at the end of all this hoop jumping, Charlotte wouldn’t even qualify for services—especially at the rate she had been picking up words. They look for a 25% delay, and I wasn’t sure she’d register that low. Now, it’s very possible that the county would’ve granted her services, but at this point, my distrust of the county program had taken over.
To boot, my mommy instinct wanted an evaluator who would be more likely to err on the side of recommending too much therapy rather than too little. The county appeared to have the opposite approach. At that point, I wanted to cut my losses and not spend any more time jumping through the program’s hoops and instead invest that time with a private therapist. Besides, we could then leave the public resources for those who really needed them, right? (Of course, one hopes those people have employers who won’t fire them for having to schedule a 2-hour intake and then a subsequent midday evaluation. I truly shudder to think what sacrifices some families have to make to get their children the therapy or other early intervention services they need. We were lucky. My boss didn’t flinch when I scheduled stuff, and I had top-notch health insurance to fall back on for private therapy. Or, I could fund it out-of-pocket if necessary. Public programs like early intervention should NOT be so cumbersome.)
I had previously called our insurance company to find out what speech therapy our plan covered. Answer: 90 speech sessions within each calendar year. More than we’d ever need.
Then I found a private speech therapist near Charlotte’s school who specializes in speech problems related to hearing impairment and deafness. I explained Charlotte’s saga to her, and we got an evaluation scheduled. SO MUCH EASIER than dealing with the county.
So, I called the county and asked them to close Charlotte’s file and informed them we’d pursue a private speech evaluation instead. Chris, my darling libertarian spouse who detests anything government-funded or controlled (except libraries, because they save his wife—and thus him—hundreds of dollars each year), wholly supported shifting to private therapy. Screw the benefit of having them come to Charlotte’s school, he said. If she needed therapy, we’d just make it work with our work schedules. Period.
The speech therapist was incredible. She knew we both worked and scheduled an early, EARLY evaluation for us. Charlotte has severe stranger anxiety (the worst in her class, the school director told me—but in nicer words than that), yet my girl was happily plopped in the therapist’s lap within about 30 seconds of meeting her. Chris and I glanced at each other, stunned. Okay, then.
Charlotte had a ball. The whole evaluation was, to her, one-on-one playtime, with Mommy and Daddy for an audience. After the evaluation, the therapist said, “Yes, she’s behind, especially for a girl.” Apparently girls develop language earlier than boys. “But she’s exactly where I’d expect her to be for someone who has had chronic ear infections.” The therapist demonstrated what sounds Charlotte had likely been hearing with fluid-filled ears, which amounted to muted, garbled noises, not distinct sounds. Obviously, she hadn’t had a prayer of repeating words when she could only hear inflections in people’s voices, not clear sounds.
That sort of broke my heart. Charlotte had been living, disconnected, in a world that perpetually sounded like she was underwater. She had had no idea what she was missing, which I suppose is good, but still. We should’ve gotten those tubes a year earlier. Hindsight is 20/20, I know, but I’m just kicking myself. (Two cliches in one sentence. Awesome, Ashley.)
“You absolutely did the right thing by getting her the tubes,” the therapist said. Chris and I mentally high-fived each other, but we already knew it had been the right move. As if she could read our minds, she said, “Parents always feel like they waited too long to get them with their first child. Trust me, with your next one, you’ll want to go straight from the delivery room to ear tube surgery.” She was joking. Sort of.
“Charlotte is obviously very bright and extremely curious,” the therapist continued, and pointed out that despite being a MAJOR thumb-sucker, Charlotte was producing MOST sounds with the correct tongue placement. “Yes, she’s behind, but she’s already doing a lot of things right [e.g., tongue placement, the complex sentence structure of “I want a cracker, please!”] and she’s very observant and catches on quickly. I really think that she’ll catch up on her own, without therapy.”
Really? Okay!
The therapist requested that she be able to do a follow-up evaluation in 3 months to ensure that Charlotte really has made the gains we think she can make on her own. In the meantime, she gave us a TON of tricks, ideas, and strategies to get Charlotte talking, talking, talking.
There were some things we just didn’t know to do, such as asking questions in a way that force Charlotte to make a choice and say a word besides yes or no. Now, instead of saying, “Do you see the rain?” we say, “Is it sunny, or is it raining?” (She replies, “It’s raining.”) We were taught how to deal with the thumb-sucking during conversations or story time, how to help her sit to improve gross motor control to the finest motor control of producing sounds, the best kind of books to use with her (woo hoo! book shopping!), and a zillion other things.
We were thrilled with the outcome of the evaluation, and I’m so glad Chris was also there to hear everything the therapist said. Between the two of us, we’re pulling as many words out of our girl as we can. The whole endeavor is quite a work in progress. I too believe that Charlotte is bright, and I know for a fact that she’s extremely observant and curious. I’m sure these traits will help her catch up. However, we’re challenged by that thumb, which is a major plug if she doesn’t feel like talking, and when you think about how vast and intricate language is, getting Charlotte caught up feels rather daunting.
I’m not trying to get Charlotte caught up to “normal” by the 3-month mark, or any other arbitrary time period. I just want to move forward, sound by sound, word by word, phrase by phrase.
Here are some recent words and phrases she has learned to say (and know):
Butterfly
Octopus
Four (considering the only other number she’d say for months when we counted was “three,” this is a huge deal)
Inside
This side
I don’t want it
Hi, Omi
I need hug
I walk
Boat
I’m eating! (always, ALWAYS with an exclamation mark!)
Whale
Big sister (okay, this is still more like “ig iserrrr,” but it’s getting there!)
Mommy, your turn
And, in an act of communicative genius, Charlotte totally ratted out her daddy. The two of them were on the deck while she ate her (whole-grain, white-meat!) chicken nuggets. We always heat up a couple extra as a quick snack to get us through Charlotte’s Evening Routine before eating our grown-up dinner. I came out to join them, and Charlotte immediately pointed to an empty plate at my spot. “Mommy, yours!” she cried then pointed accusingly at Chris. “BUT DADDY EAT!”
Gasp. “Daddy ate my chicken nugget?” I asked.
“YES!” Charlotte cried.
I feigned great indignation, fueling Charlotte’s genuine indignation.
Chris, meanwhile, had his jaw dropped open, stunned he’d been exposed as a thief of chicken nuggets. “So this language development thing,” he said. “It has its drawbacks.”
The next loooooong step was determining her need for speech therapy. Oy.
Fortunately, one of my very good friends, Meghan, happens to have a mum who is a speech therapist in the SF Bay Area. So, we coordinated our West Coast vs. East Coast schedules and had a lovely phone call together, and she told Chris and me everything we needed to know. She was incredibly helpful, and it was such a relief to get the insider perspective of how everything works and what we should do.
We decided to pursue public (county-provided) therapy for Charlotte first, because those therapists will go directly to the child’s “natural environment,” which meant they’d do therapy at Charlotte’s school—scoring major points for this full-time working mum (but not without first reprimanding you for your lack of parental involvement, I since learned). Additionally, Charlotte’s school is very used to working with the county therapists and assured me that they could easily accommodate whatever at-school therapy Charlotte might need. So, I jumped through the first several hoops, which mainly involved lots of phone calls and reiterating over and over again Charlotte’s story thus far.
Eventually, we got scheduled for a 2-hour “intake” at our house, in which the “early intervention specialist” (who apparently is a specialist in obtaining paperwork and parent signatures and recording answers to parent-report assessments) explained precisely how bureaucratic public early intervention is and “observed” Charlotte, which mostly amounted to asking me, “Should Charlotte be coloring on the walls?” (In my defense, I was busy filling out all her effing paperwork, plus Charlotte’s markers are those “wonder” markers that only mark on special paper.) The specialist was very nice, and even used the line “I get it—I’m a working mom too,” which scored a point, but this took out a huge chunk of our day and accomplished pretty much nil.
A week or two later, the gazillionth representative from the county called me, informing me that Charlotte’s evaluation would take place at our house the following morning at 10:00 a.m. I told her that one day was not enough notice, and even if it was, 10:00 a.m. is the equivalent of being right smack in the middle of our day, seeing as how I’d still have to get Charlotte to school (hopefully before lunch and nap!) and myself to work quite far away from our house. Besides, I had been gone the week before in Indianapolis and needed to be in my actual OFFICE for a bit. You know, to earn the salary that pays the taxes that fund such programs as THIS one. (Well, I left that last part out, but you get the idea . . .)
The rep was fairly nice about my refusal to schedule the evaluation and said she’d convene with her team and discuss a time the following week—and then she’d let me know when it was scheduled for. (Don’t you LOVE the lack of control you have when dealing with government programs?)
I said fine, hung up, and immediately called Chris. I secured his blessing to pull Charlotte out of the county program. I had had so many conversations and had put in so much time up to this point, and Charlotte STILL hadn’t been evaluated (and I had been informed that it may or may NOT be an actual speech therapist who would do the speech evaluation—I’m not sure that’s even legal). It was possible that at the end of all this hoop jumping, Charlotte wouldn’t even qualify for services—especially at the rate she had been picking up words. They look for a 25% delay, and I wasn’t sure she’d register that low. Now, it’s very possible that the county would’ve granted her services, but at this point, my distrust of the county program had taken over.
To boot, my mommy instinct wanted an evaluator who would be more likely to err on the side of recommending too much therapy rather than too little. The county appeared to have the opposite approach. At that point, I wanted to cut my losses and not spend any more time jumping through the program’s hoops and instead invest that time with a private therapist. Besides, we could then leave the public resources for those who really needed them, right? (Of course, one hopes those people have employers who won’t fire them for having to schedule a 2-hour intake and then a subsequent midday evaluation. I truly shudder to think what sacrifices some families have to make to get their children the therapy or other early intervention services they need. We were lucky. My boss didn’t flinch when I scheduled stuff, and I had top-notch health insurance to fall back on for private therapy. Or, I could fund it out-of-pocket if necessary. Public programs like early intervention should NOT be so cumbersome.)
I had previously called our insurance company to find out what speech therapy our plan covered. Answer: 90 speech sessions within each calendar year. More than we’d ever need.
Then I found a private speech therapist near Charlotte’s school who specializes in speech problems related to hearing impairment and deafness. I explained Charlotte’s saga to her, and we got an evaluation scheduled. SO MUCH EASIER than dealing with the county.
So, I called the county and asked them to close Charlotte’s file and informed them we’d pursue a private speech evaluation instead. Chris, my darling libertarian spouse who detests anything government-funded or controlled (except libraries, because they save his wife—and thus him—hundreds of dollars each year), wholly supported shifting to private therapy. Screw the benefit of having them come to Charlotte’s school, he said. If she needed therapy, we’d just make it work with our work schedules. Period.
The speech therapist was incredible. She knew we both worked and scheduled an early, EARLY evaluation for us. Charlotte has severe stranger anxiety (the worst in her class, the school director told me—but in nicer words than that), yet my girl was happily plopped in the therapist’s lap within about 30 seconds of meeting her. Chris and I glanced at each other, stunned. Okay, then.
Charlotte had a ball. The whole evaluation was, to her, one-on-one playtime, with Mommy and Daddy for an audience. After the evaluation, the therapist said, “Yes, she’s behind, especially for a girl.” Apparently girls develop language earlier than boys. “But she’s exactly where I’d expect her to be for someone who has had chronic ear infections.” The therapist demonstrated what sounds Charlotte had likely been hearing with fluid-filled ears, which amounted to muted, garbled noises, not distinct sounds. Obviously, she hadn’t had a prayer of repeating words when she could only hear inflections in people’s voices, not clear sounds.
That sort of broke my heart. Charlotte had been living, disconnected, in a world that perpetually sounded like she was underwater. She had had no idea what she was missing, which I suppose is good, but still. We should’ve gotten those tubes a year earlier. Hindsight is 20/20, I know, but I’m just kicking myself. (Two cliches in one sentence. Awesome, Ashley.)
“You absolutely did the right thing by getting her the tubes,” the therapist said. Chris and I mentally high-fived each other, but we already knew it had been the right move. As if she could read our minds, she said, “Parents always feel like they waited too long to get them with their first child. Trust me, with your next one, you’ll want to go straight from the delivery room to ear tube surgery.” She was joking. Sort of.
“Charlotte is obviously very bright and extremely curious,” the therapist continued, and pointed out that despite being a MAJOR thumb-sucker, Charlotte was producing MOST sounds with the correct tongue placement. “Yes, she’s behind, but she’s already doing a lot of things right [e.g., tongue placement, the complex sentence structure of “I want a cracker, please!”] and she’s very observant and catches on quickly. I really think that she’ll catch up on her own, without therapy.”
Really? Okay!
The therapist requested that she be able to do a follow-up evaluation in 3 months to ensure that Charlotte really has made the gains we think she can make on her own. In the meantime, she gave us a TON of tricks, ideas, and strategies to get Charlotte talking, talking, talking.
There were some things we just didn’t know to do, such as asking questions in a way that force Charlotte to make a choice and say a word besides yes or no. Now, instead of saying, “Do you see the rain?” we say, “Is it sunny, or is it raining?” (She replies, “It’s raining.”) We were taught how to deal with the thumb-sucking during conversations or story time, how to help her sit to improve gross motor control to the finest motor control of producing sounds, the best kind of books to use with her (woo hoo! book shopping!), and a zillion other things.
We were thrilled with the outcome of the evaluation, and I’m so glad Chris was also there to hear everything the therapist said. Between the two of us, we’re pulling as many words out of our girl as we can. The whole endeavor is quite a work in progress. I too believe that Charlotte is bright, and I know for a fact that she’s extremely observant and curious. I’m sure these traits will help her catch up. However, we’re challenged by that thumb, which is a major plug if she doesn’t feel like talking, and when you think about how vast and intricate language is, getting Charlotte caught up feels rather daunting.
I’m not trying to get Charlotte caught up to “normal” by the 3-month mark, or any other arbitrary time period. I just want to move forward, sound by sound, word by word, phrase by phrase.
Here are some recent words and phrases she has learned to say (and know):
Butterfly
Octopus
Four (considering the only other number she’d say for months when we counted was “three,” this is a huge deal)
Inside
This side
I don’t want it
Hi, Omi
I need hug
I walk
Boat
I’m eating! (always, ALWAYS with an exclamation mark!)
Whale
Big sister (okay, this is still more like “ig iserrrr,” but it’s getting there!)
Mommy, your turn
And, in an act of communicative genius, Charlotte totally ratted out her daddy. The two of them were on the deck while she ate her (whole-grain, white-meat!) chicken nuggets. We always heat up a couple extra as a quick snack to get us through Charlotte’s Evening Routine before eating our grown-up dinner. I came out to join them, and Charlotte immediately pointed to an empty plate at my spot. “Mommy, yours!” she cried then pointed accusingly at Chris. “BUT DADDY EAT!”
Gasp. “Daddy ate my chicken nugget?” I asked.
“YES!” Charlotte cried.
I feigned great indignation, fueling Charlotte’s genuine indignation.
Chris, meanwhile, had his jaw dropped open, stunned he’d been exposed as a thief of chicken nuggets. “So this language development thing,” he said. “It has its drawbacks.”
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA....I love that she tattled on Chris. Watch out, sir, that won't be the last time!
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear she's doing so well!