Updates

So, I'm just getting around to updating from McLaine's Early Steps evaluation last week. Things went both good and bad. The good news is McLaine tested low average in 2 categories and completely average in 3 categories. This means she's not severe enough to be called clinically delayed by their standards. The bad news is because she's not testing out as delayed, she does not qualify for any services. The speech therapist did say that McLaine should be babbling with consonant sounds by now (she currently only makes vowel sounds). She says she can see McLaine's mouth moving with purpose, but that her tongue doesn't follow suit. The tongue is, of course, a muscle, so with low muscle tone she is having problems getting it to do what she wants. The evaluator did do us a favor and tweak her score a bit so there was a 3 point difference between her receptive and communicative language skills. This qualified her to have an evaluator/therapist come to the house once a month and sort of "check on her" so that she can stay in the program. This way if she does start to fall more behind in anything, they can catch it early and get her the help she needs. The evaluator/therapist may also work with her a bit or give us some activities that we can do with her ourselves. The evaluator did say he thought McLaine could definitely benefit from physical therapy (her weakest area was gross motor) if we could afford to do it out of pocket. I'm going to look into it for sure, so I suppose we'll find out if it's do-able for us. We can also submit her to be re-evaluated again in 3 months which I will definitely be doing.



I took these pictures of McLaine a couple weeks ago in her "baby armchair." She looked like a little old man from the back and I just thought the back of her head looked so cute :)





Halloween is coming up this week and I am so excited! I'd like to say McLaine is excited but I doubt she knows it's Halloween lol :) Many Halloween pics to come I'm sure!