Hellobee

It’s been a while since I have updated about Juliet and early intervention, so this is where we are now.

Juliet has been in early intervention now for close to 2 years. She started around nine months old and was enrolled at one point in developmental, physical, and speech. At nearly two and a half she is only in speech now. Early intervention services are only available until a child is three, so in June Juliet will age out of the program. She has made such vast strides since being enrolled, and I can’t speak more highly of the quality of care and services she has received.

Juliet has been with her speech therapist now since April, and she went from a nonverbal child to a chatting toddler today. When she started early intervention, she barely had any words. Most of the time she wouldn’t speak at all and used other methods to let us know what she wanted. Starting around August she started to pick up more words, and from then it was stringing those words together to using words to talk vs just answering us. Juliet has certainly increased her vocabulary, but she still is delayed as she doesn’t complete a lot of words when she speaks. For instance when she says “cat” she will start the “ca” sound without the “t,” so much of her talk is still somewhat unintelligible.

The important part though is her attempt at using her words to communicate and her willingness to try to close her existing words when we prompt her to. Since she has been progressing so well, I have high hopes that this may not be an issue when she graduates from the program in six months. A lot can change in a short of amount of time, as shown by her language explosion since April.

In September when we had Juliet’s biannual 6 month review, her case worker asked about my thoughts on pre-school. Because Juliet is in early intervention, she is eligible for our town’s pre-school program, which is free for children who qualify for special needs. If we were to pursue it, early intervention would contact the school in January and the initial meeting would consist of my case worker and someone from the school.  Then we would schedule an evaluation where Juliet would meet with the school child study team, speech therapist, social worker etc. and they would determine whether she qualified for the program.

This is a gray area for us because other than speech Juliet is typical, and possibly a little ahead in every other developmental stage. There is a chance the school will decide she doesn’t meet their criteria, and the meetings would end after that. If the school did feel like she would be a good match for their programs, then Juliet would be enrolled the following September. If she didn’t qualify I could also enter her into the lottery system (something I had tried with Drake but he wasn’t selected). The program is for special needs children in the town, but there are always a few slots open to the general population to integrate in a few classrooms.  This also allows special needs and general education children to learn from one another and destigmatize differences at a young age.

We start the initial meeting next week to learn more about the program, and we will most likely have Juliet tested to see if she qualifies. While the idea of 5 day free pre-school appeals a lot to me, I also worry a little about placing Juliet in a program if she is not as delayed as most of the other children in the program. Public pre-school classrooms will most likely be larger than a private classroom (Drake’s private preschool classes were 7 and 11 kids when he attended), and I do worry that she might get less attention if she is a child who only is lacking in one area. We’ll see what happens and always have the preschool Drake attended as a backup, which we loved and miss.