Hellobee

In September Juliet completed her sixth month of early intervention! Every six months early intervention does an assessment to see if the child has been improving under services, review the goals that have been met, whether services need to be continued, added, stopped, etc. I have blogged in the past about Juliet’s evaluation since they do the assessment before the review.

On the move!

Right before her review Juliet made a burst of improvements in many areas that really had me and her therapists excited.  The big one of course being walking! Throughout the month of July Juliet had been pulling up to stand and holding onto furniture to cruise around. Towards the beginning of August, she started to be able to pull up to stand without any support (meaning just from the middle of the floor on her own). Her physical therapist was impressed by that as she said that was a 15 month skill, and at the time Juliet was barely 14 months.

For weeks I would try to walk with her guiding her with my hands, but she would have none of it. Then right before September rolled around, she took her first tiny step. Not two days later she took a long stride across the kitchen and we officially had a walker! Juliet beat her big brother in this milestone by almost a whole month, walking at 14 months of age. Juliet is now mostly walking. She is getting steadier on her feet and relying on crawling less and less, though in public she still tends to want to drop to crawling after her first tumble. I am hoping by Halloween we will have 2 kids trick or treating.

Her favorite place to hang out every morning

Besides walking, Juliet has also mastered going up and down the stairs and her favorite thing: climbing! They say every child is different in this milestone. Drake, especially at this young age, never attempted to climb anything. In fact it took him almost until three before he started to even attempt climbing up on objects. Juliet has now scaled the ottoman, couches, slides, and her favorite thing – mommy & daddy’s bed!

It’s amazing to see how fearless she is when she climbs. I took her to the park one day with Drake. After watching Drake from the sidelines, she started to get fussy in my arms. I placed her at the bottom of the slide and she started to climb up it. The few other parents there were amazed as she doggedly started to climb up. It took her a few tries but she eventually got herself to the top where big brother greeted her with joy. Drake only started to attempt climbing slides shortly before he turned four, and now at not even a year and a half Juliet has caught up to him in this skill! It’s amazing to me that my one child who is supposedly delayed can accomplish such feats that my supposedly nondelayed child couldn’t do at her age. It also makes me wonder how much of being able to see her brother and his movements helps encourage her to try things faster to keep up with him.

Juliet’s other big burst of progress came in speech, which has always been a issue for her. For a long time Juliet was a very silent child. We used to joke that there was no need for her to attempt speaking with Drake around since he could easily talk for five children, but looking back Juliet has always been a quiet child. I noticed it even when she was only four or five months old that while other babies would coo and make small sounds, Juliet rarely ever “talked” to me. She would smile and look at me when I spoke to her, but besides some laughs she never babbled or gurgled back either. Even at the start of early intervention when she was making lots of bursts in physical development with her therapist, she rarely made sounds during her developmental therapy sessions.

Right as she started to walk, another burst came in the form of language. We started to hear more sounds, ahhs, baas, yaaas, and the joyous words of both ma ma & da da. She started to watch our mouths and imitate us when we blew raspberries, clicked our tongues, etc. She also started those sounds on her own, watching for us to copy her back.

Juliet started to point, which is developmentally important for speech as it introduces new objects to them. All of a sudden our quiet baby was sitting in her car seat babbling to herself in the mirror or singing along with her brother’s songs. She also started to mimic movements, sign “more” and “all done,” and started placing objects back into containers instead of just emptying them. It was like a light bulb went off in her mind and she finally saw what she was supposed to do. Her therapists both said most likely she had been working so hard these past months on her physical growth, that speech and development took a bit of a backseat. Now that she finally mastered enough physical milestones, she could refocus on other areas of growth. It seems like every week her therapists came to see her, I had something new to tell them she had started. It was such a wonderful feeling to be able to see so much change in such a short amount of time.

At her actual evaluation, both her therapists as well as her service coordinator at early intervention came and sat down with me to discuss everything. Juliet didn’t have to be present for this meeting and was actually napping when it took place. The service coordinator reviewed her previous evaluation (taken when she was 12/13 months old), and the goals we had set for her when she first started the program (at 6/7 months) to see how much progress she had made, as well as any new information her therapists had to add about her progress since the evaluation. They asked me about my feelings with the services, therapists, and goals, and what I wanted to see Juliet be able to do for the next six months. Overall the therapists and coordinator agreed that Juliet should remain in the program for the next six months with the same guidelines – physical once a month, developmental once a week. Her physical therapist was close to dismissing her, but wanted to stay on for a few more months since she had just started to walk to see her progress and make sure her stance and stride get more consistent and narrow. Most likely Juliet will stop physical therapy before six months is up, but I’m happy she will get a few more sessions to monitor her progress. She is going to stay with just the developmental for now and we will have a mini reevaluation in Dec/Jan if her speech does not take some bigger strides, in the hopes of getting her a speech therapist possibly later down the road.

Overall I have been very happy with the progress Juliet has made through the Early Intervention program.  I feel her needs are being met and she is starting to gain back some of the lost time it seems she started off with, closing the gap on her delays. I am optimistic that perhaps we will leave the program before she ages out at age 3.

Climbing those mountains!