Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Developmental Testing Results

On Friday, we met with Julie and Lindsay, the child development specialist and the speech pathologist, for the results of the testing they did on the triplets. It was eye opening, to say the least.

I knew the boys were behind - I just had no idea they were as far behind as they are. All three qualified for services, at the highest possible level. They each get one hour per month with Julie and one hour per month with Lindsay. That will mean that on the second Friday and fourth Monday of every month they will have someone here.

I'll start with Nathanial since he's oldest. Social-Emotional and physical were well within normal ranges for him at 29 months and 26 months (respectively), which is fantastic. Adaptive was right at 18 months. Cognitive was 15 months and communication (receptive and expressive combined) was 9 months. That's a very significant delay. A 25% delay, to qualify for services, was 18 months. For him, we are going to work on first learning sounds and then building words from those sounds with Lindsay (speech pathologist). With Julie (child development), we will be working on sequence of play, behavior modification (specifically for hitting/biting, smearing, and throwing), and toilet sequencing and signs.

Ethan was at 22 months for social-emotional and 20 months for physical. He was at 18 months for adaptive. Cognitive was 16 months and communication was 14 months. Again, significant delays. For him, with Lindsay we will be working on learning sounds and then building words with those sounds. With Julie, we will be working on behavior modifications (specifically for hitting/biting and throwing), developing a very strict routine, and play sequencing. We have been noticing a lot of responses to stress with him, so will also watch him with that. Right now, it actually could be a very good thing developmentally (he's learning emotions), but we want to make sure that it is an appropriate response to appropriate stress. For example, sometimes the tiniest thing can happen and he does his little automatic response (sucks fingers and rubs his hair) so that could be a problem. Surprisingly, his stubbornness was a good thing developmentally. Who knew?

Noah was pretty close to Ethan developmentally. His social-emotional was at 22 months (lost some points because he was very clingy and has been lately). Physical and adaptive were both right at 18 months. Cognitive was 16 months and communication was 13 months. More significant delays. For him, with Lindsay, since he already has an excellent base of sounds, we can just pick up on that and work on building words right away, so that's a huge advantage. With Julie, we are going to work on sequence of play, toilet sequencing, and learning more signs and using them.

At this point, none of them appear to be on the spectrum, but we are still going to watch them closely. A huge plus was they all were well within normal ranges within the social-emotional testing areas.

Ethan was chosen to have a strict routine because he is the most rambunctious of the three and really has a short, short fuse. I thought we had a pretty strict routine already, but when I looked at it, there is a lot of freedom within our schedule for pretty much anything for two hours at a time. That's a lot to a two year old! The hope is, also, that if Ethan learns it, the other two will naturally follow it since he seems to be the ring leader.

They talked with us a little about preschool and since we are right now qualified under the "Birth to 3" program, if they still need services, they may have to go to preschool at 3, instead of 4, like I wanted. I think this will probably be OK, it's just an adjustment in my thinking. Then, also, they may not qualify for the private preschool we currently use because they do not have a special ed teacher. However, when I talked with Aidan's teacher about this, she said that she thinks they could qualify and just have aids for them. We'll just have to see. That's a l-o-n-g way off, so I'm not concerned about it right now.

I'm relieved they are getting services and relieved we finally have the results back. It seemed like it took for-ever to get those back! I'm still wrapping my brain around all the information we received and processing it all.

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