Life’s a Dance

(This was an entry I meant to write a couple weeks ago.  I was going to skip it now but decided I wnted it for posterity.)

Elizabeth is back on the growth charts, finally!!  We had her initial speech eval done a couple weeks ago and the peds agreed that there seems to be a delay/issue of some sort.  The first doctor was just starting his rotation in peds (major teaching hospital), so we took a basic overview of Elizabeth, asked some questions about BFing past one as she decided she needed to nurse while we were there (he didn’t have any training on that so I got to educate him! He called me a couple weeks later and thanked me for the books & websites I recommended to him–yea!), etc and then went to talk to a couple of docs on the peds team.  The doc who came back asked me lots of questions about her speech (or lack thereof) and decided to get us further evaluated.  So she has an appointment with a speech pathologist this week and an appointment with an audiologist next week.  If there truly is enough of a delay to cause concern, we’ll go from there. 

I was somewhat hesitant to go for the evaluation since she is still so young.  But that was also the reason I wanted to get it checked out.  If there IS a problem, I’d like to help her now while her mind is still so young.  If she didn’t have so much frustration surrounding it, I would likely hold off.  But I’ve been holding off for months now and things aren’t improving much.  My intuition has told me there was a problem for about 9 months now and I’ve played the wait-and-see game.  The other part that made me want to go ahead is the appearant
difference in her receptive language & expressive language skills. 
She has great receptive language (somewhat ahead of her age from what
I’ve read) while her expressive language is more like that of a
12-month old (from what I’ve read).  A 9-month difference is quite a
bit at this age.

So, we’ll see what happens!  I am very pleased that a) we found out she was back on the growth charts….16 months after she dropped off! and b) the doctors actually took me seriously and agreed that we should further evaluate.