I gave up on Babies Can’t Wait…actually, they are still supposed to be calling me to set up “music therapy.” Now that I could care less, I am waiting to see how long it actually takes for them to follow through. So far, it has been almost 2 months.
I found a private therapy place for Kaycie, and unfortunately, it is quite a drive. However, they do take our insurance and I just got a really good feeling about them after calling around to every other place I could find. We figure that if we are paying for it, we want the best services we can get. We went ahead and had her evaluated for physical therapy as well as speech and feeding therapy. I figured if we were going to do this, we were going to have them look at everything.
At her physical therapy evaluation, they decided that she has very weak core strength, which is what we sort of figured. She is still struggling with sitting, but she is starting to get around a lot better already. She is now going to physical therapy on Mondays…she actually likes it. The therapist is actually also a certified infant massage therapist, so she has been showing my some infant massage techniques, too. She works hard while there, and we get homework to work on throughout the week. We are not sure why her core muscles are so weak, but they seem to think that with a few months of work, she will get caught up and no longer need those services.
At Kaycie’s feeding/speech therapy evaluation, they pretty much confirmed the obvious…she is a little behind with her expressive and receptive language, but not horribly so. She is at about the level of a 6 month old for both feeding and speech…she is 8.5 months old. It isn’t a huge gap, but a few months can make a big difference when she is so young. The feeding therapy is actually just a byproduct of all of this right now. Feeding therapy is done by the speech therapist at her age since many of the same muscles are used to eat and form sounds. Since Kaycie will still not tolerate solids, they are going ahead and doing both the speech and feeding together. Also, most of feeding therapy is covered by insurance while speech therapy is not. This gives us some time to have it covered, and hopefully, once she is finished with the feeding part, they will come up with another speech “diagnosis” that may be covered. It gets us through our immediate needs for now and is such a huge relief!
This has all been a huge source of stress for me because we just want what is best for Kaycie, and it has been so hard to figure out what we really need. Today, I know we are on the right track. Kaycie is just all of a sudden blossoming. She is happy. She is interacting. She is very aware of her surroundings without freaking out. Maybe part of it is that I have stopped stressing out about it, and in turn so has she. We long ago discovered that Kaycie’s needs are different than many babies, but then again, who in this family likes to take the easy road?! Now that we are in a rhythm, I just see the light.
When sorting through all of this information, I was pointed to an essay that sort of just stuck with me. It is called “Welcome to Holland”. We are in Holland, not Italy…Kaycie’s “special needs” may not be to the extreme of many children with disabilities, but it has taken some time to figure out our path and now that we have one, I really sort of like Holland…every little thing is something to be celebrated around here!
 |
| Not sure if this video will work, but I will try. |
