Thursday, June 4, 2009

Weekly Update -- 4 - 10 May 2009

Yay, I'm 122 weeks old today!

Masinja went for a followup PT appointment on Friday. When he was discharged in October, his therapist said she wanted to follow up with him in 6-8 months just to make sure he was still on track. She was pretty pleased with his progress and even amazed at his cognitive development. During the evalution she had him kneel and while he was doing so she asked him to tell her some letters. Masinja proceeded to start naming letters. She turned to me and said, "Do you know how great that is? That is a completely abstract idea and for him to be able to grasp it is great!"

I told her that he knows all, but a few of the letters of the alphabet and that he knows most of the numbers 0-9, as well as the colors blue and green. She was pretty impressed! We then took Masinja out to the playground setup that they have in the clinic so she could see if he had improved as far as climbing stairs. He did a pretty good job going up, but he wouldn't go down unassisted and in fact he was shaking and grabing her shirt when he was on the edge of a step. She said he has gravitational insecurity. Basically, he's not comfortable when he doesn't feel supported. It explains why he doesn't like swinging for very long too. She gave me some ideas on how to work with him to help him overcome it. Other than the gravitational insecurity, he is right on track as far as PT is concerned, speech however is a different matter all together.

During his PT evaluation Masinja's therapist was concerned about his speech. She knew that he was in the ECI program and she asked how that was going. I admitted to her that T.M. and I still had concerns about his speech. I told her that there seemed to be some miscommunication as far as the ECI program was concerned and that we didn't feel like our concerns were being taken seriously. His therapist asked my permission to have one of the speech therapists sit in on his evaluation for a few minutes to listen to him talk. I agreed of course. The speech therapist sat in for about 10-15 minutes. I explained to her that he was in ECI and that we had been told that he has an articulation problem and not to worry about it because due to his age it is normal. She said she thought he had a phonetic problem and not an articulation problem. She said that it seems to her that he isn't hearing the sounds correctly and therefore isn't processing them correctly which is why he can't pronounce them correctly. She put him on the waiting list so we could take him for a full evaluation and hopefully start speech therapy. We will keep you posted on what happens.

We went to the zoo again today. We stayed for about 3 - 4 hours and saw a bunch more exhibits. We still haven't seen everything yet though! I think Masinja's favorite animals this time were the bears. Once agian it took a lot of pointing to get him to actually pay attention to the animals. He was more into people watching. We didn't actually go into the Dairy World exhibit but T.M. insisted that I take their picture next to the sign. It's kind of a personal joke with Masinja's Godfather Tom :O)

Dairy World Pic

That's all for now.

Peace,
T.M.M.

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