Assessment, round 2

We're on to the next agency here in speech development land. They came by the house today to do a general evaluation, all five areas again. Three women: an intake coordinator, a special ed teacher, and a trainee. The intake coordinator asked me questions while the teacher played with A. The trainee watched.

A was in a great mood and was his bubbly outgoing self. He sat them down, brought them toys, and tried to share the toys the teacher gave him with the other two women. "He wants to make sure everyone's involved," the teacher said. "He's got great play skills. He should be a social worker when he grows up."

It was same old, same old for questions. We hit an impasse in the play portion of the exam because A refused to play with the blocks. The teacher had lots more fun things in her bag of tricks and he didn't want to play with blocks when he has a gazillion sets of blocks in the house already. He'd already brought a set of blocks out for the women to play with.

The teacher asked if he was an only child, and then said, "Gosh, with play skills like his and all these toys, you should have five more." Um, no. No no no. She also approved of our toys. They're good toys. Active toys make passive babies, you know.

Anyway, he's a scattered kid. This does not have anything to do with his focus, which is legendary and laser-like and was commented upon by the women; I'm talking test results. He's literally all over. Won't play with blocks, 15 months for cognitive and 12 months for fine motor. Threads three beads on a string, 30 months for cognitive and fine motor. Makes the overall scoring a bit inaccurate.

His receptive language is fine; he's got a delay in his expressive language. According to the math of the test, he's showing a 25% delay in speech development, which is not enough to require the services of the more intensive agency. But they think his expressive is far enough behind that it requires further investigation, so they're going to have a speech evaluation done.

When they were all through, they asked me if I had any questions, and so I asked, "In your opinions, should I be worried about him?"

And they all looked at each other and the teacher said, "No. I wouldn't. On a ten point scale, I'd say you should worry about a 3, which you probably already are. He's very bright; his play skills are great, very directed. Play is the basis for speech. He talks a lot already in jargon and I'm guessing one day you'll be saying, 'We thought he wouldn't talk and now we can't get him to stop.'"

So I'm somewhat relieved, although it felt anticlimactic to have three people tell me what I thought about my kid already was right. They don't know why he doesn't talk either, but there's a ton of money to be had if we figure it out (and apply it across many other kids in the universe).