Here's the monthly update on Henry...
This is his last week of speech therapy in the toddler group through the Ottawa Area Center and Early On. Tomorrow is "Barn Day" out at the OAC which I think Henry will love. There will be pony rides, face painting, a petting zoo and tons of other stuff. I think he'll really be into it since they have been working (successfully) on animal noises with him. He'll have group again on Thursday and then Early On is pretty much off for the summer. They have four meeting which Henry will go to - 2 in June and 2 in July.
Henry's doctor at DeVos Children's Hospital recommended summer speech therapy for Henry last time we saw her and today he had an evaluation appointment with a therapist through Holland Hospital Rehabilitation Services. I was really impressed with the therapist there and she did a great evaluation of Hanks. She placed him at "average" or about 20 months for comprehension of language and "poor" or about 7 months for verbal speech. Those numbers are found based mostly on yes and no answers that I give on an assessment test, so they aren't exactly 100% accurate. I think he's a bit further on verbal speech, but only a couple of months or so, still putting him at "poor."
None of this was surprising for us and just reaffirmed our decision to continue getting him available help. He will have speech therapy every week for a half hour each time one on one. We may decide to go twice a week if we aren't seeing improvement from the one session. They will work on more sign language with him (which is the cutest thing ever) and try to work on some things that may be frustrating for him. For example, he often gets really frustrated at dinner when he can't communicate what he wants/needs. The therapist talked about making a menu-book where there are pictures of his favorite foods and he can work on the words and signs for those, using that to communicate to us in the future.
We feel good about moving forward with this and have already seen growth in the past couple of weeks - it's a great thing to see!
Thanks again for prayers, emails and support - we definitely feel it all!
5 comments:
Sounds like Hanks is doing really good! Good for you guys for sticking with the advancement classes and the evaluations - you are doing the right thing! Hope you have a great day!
I just want to second that "good for you," not just for taking advantage of the available resources, but for being so open in sharing about your experiences here. Also I thought I'd let you know that I did a search for "bethany mulder" on myspace and came up with a 22-year old african american whose screen name is "Bigg Betty." The moral of the story: you'd better get on myspace and represent.
Oh yeah, that last comment was from me. No, not Bigg Betty... it's beck.
Very good hanks....
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