ECI Evaluation

mommy0411

Well my son finally had his early intervention evaluation. I knew they were going to give me specific numbers on how delayed he is but i didn't expect it to so hard to hear how far behind he is. 

His language is delayed the most, he tested at a 7.5 month old level and he is almost 20 months old (55% delay). I believe they called it his social skills were at an 11.5 month old level and his cognitive skills were at a 13 month old level (this is actually awesome considering how low his language is). The occupational therapist also confirmed that he has SPD and pretty low muscle tone.

He qualified for 3 hours per month of occupational therapy, 4 hours per month with the early intervention specialist and will most likely get at least 4 hours per month of speech. He will be officially done with private speech therapy next week and then we will get his speech therapy info. 

It seems like so much therapy especially with the early interventionist. Does anyone know exactly what the early interventionist does? They were pretty vague yesterday and just said therapy would start after the holidays.

I am glad we have all of these resources available to us, I just never expected to have to use them! I am also a little terrified to think what other issues could be waiting for us to find as he develops more.

Thanks for listening!  

kcisthebombdotcom

Your little guy sounds a lot like my son did at 20 months. His language skills were just a bit better--he tested at a 9 month level (which I'm sure isn't much different). He also has SPD and started OT at that time. He was retested in August of this year (so after one year of therapy) and his scores across the board are all in the average range. That much therapy really made a huge difference in his case.

In my son's case the SPD was driving a lot of his delays. Once we went through a good 4 month period of trial and error of finding the right balance of sensory activities his language really exploded.

In terms of the early interventionist, they're just another person that are going to look at overall development. They act very similarly to the speech therapist--they get on the ground and engage him with toys/the routine of speech therapy.

GL!

mopdop2000

I remember how hard it was to hear for the first time how delayed ds2 is. He was 18 months at his initial EI eval, and everything except gross motor was around 6 months. His gross motor was closer to 9 months. I knew he was delayed but not to that extent. We started with 1 hr of interventionist therapy week, increasesing the hours and therpists as we saw fit.He now goes to preschool 4 hrs, 4 days a week. While there he has 1 hr sped ed a day, speech and OT/PT once a week. Outside of school he has 1 hr speech, 1 hr PT, 1 hr OT and 3 hrs ABA. So he is super busy.  When we first started the EI process - before diagnosis- dh stated that he didn't want our whole family life to revolve around ds2's needs and a therapy schedule. I have honoured that as much as possible by having all therapy during school hours so nothing disrupts the weekend/evenings. Apart from our other son's karate that is!!!

 At the original dev ped appt they tested him for all areas and he was super behind. He was just retested for everything again in September, at 4 yrs 2 months, and he is still super delated (and always will be) but I can rejoice in the improvements he's made. He scored higher in all areas, which for a kid with Fragile X is HUGE to make improvements. He is still on the cusp of intellectual disability, and technially has the language skills of a 12 month old, higher if you include his sign language, but I can be happy with the improvement.

So my advice is to take the challenge to increase his skills by the next assesment. Take advantage of any therapy hours you are offered, and don't be afraid to ask for more if you aren't seeing any improvement.