evaluation

[If you didn't get the update from yesterday, start below...]

The AZEIP evaluator, Christine, came this morning. John got a score of 30 in the area of speech. A "typical" 30-month old (John is 31 months) scores about 38.5. Christine was surprised at his high score, but I think it's because he is just fine on communicating (not talking) and on his receptive language scores. Even though he scored high (she expected him to score in the teens), she is still recommending that a development specialist and speech language pathologist come to our house for a two hour evaluation (today's was less than 45 minutes). Though he can understand and communicate, he only uses about 10 words/phrases, and that's more than 50 percent behind the average. She also said that based on her initial evaluation, John would qualify for the preschool. We found out that it's at the elementary school about 3 blocks from our house (yay!) and that there is a mix of developmentally delayed and developmentally average kids. I was wondering how they would teach John to talk if all the kids were mute boys and girls!

Now we're waiting for the next evaluation. Apparently the speech language pathologist gets on the floor with the kids he evaluates and plays with them for two hours! Won't John eat that right up? (-: Christine recommended that we plan for a long nap that day because he'll be exhausted from all the fun. I'm encouraged and eager to see what the next specialists have to say. Hooray for government programs that help kids succeed!

P.S. In totally unrelated news, Hava is days away from crawling. She does a scoot/lunge/face-plant move now that does the trick but soon she'll be really crawling. Oh boy!