Hellobee

Sweet P started Early Intervention a month ago, and it has been such a positive experience so far! We started with a developmental therapist/early childhood specialist who comes to our house once a week. Even thought Sweet P has been notorious about going to or even smiling at new people, she has loved Ms. Jen from the first day she came and even stuck out her arms to be picked up! Sweet P must have sensed that Ms. Jen was an expert in kids her age.

I will admit that the developmental therapy is totally different than I had expected. I thought that she would spend time working one-on-one with Sweet P and working specifically on speech while I watched their interactions. But instead it’s more of her teaching me how to implement strategies to use with Sweet P throughout our everyday activities, routines, and play time. Each week Ms. Jen asks if there is anything specific I would like to work on with Sweet P and how she is progressing, and that guides our time together. We also follow Sweet P’s lead with what she’s interested in playing with during her time here. Since Little Piñata is at preschool during our scheduled times, I think Sweet P is mostly just really excited about the focused attention of two adults and no big brother to take her toys away, so she is usually all smiles through the whole hour.

Some of the things I’ve learned in the few weeks that Ms. Jen has been coming include being more intentional about literacy and simplifying how we read to her. I had never thought about it before, but since she has so few words (just one when we got started), she recommended we make books simpler by pointing out picture on each page and identifying it. It’s such a simple tip that I just hadn’t thought of before! She also recommended that we sing more simple kids’ songs with actions for Sweet P to connect words and motions together. So we have been singing “If You’re Happy and You Know It” around the house more.

Checking out “Goodnight Moon” in the church nursery

Since we got started Sweet P has started to love books. She showed a little bit of interest before, but now she loves picking out a book, bringing it to one of us and plopping down in one of our laps to have us read it to her. She has started pointing to pictures in books and started saying a couple more words and animal sounds! When we started her only word was “no” and an occasional “woof” when we saw a dog, but she now says her own versions of thank you, more, meow, dog, mama, dada, dog, uh oh, yum, whee, ball, vroom, and bear! She doesn’t say them 100% of the time, but for one month of work I would say she has definitely made progress.

And the ironic thing is that she originally qualified for physical therapy at least twice a month, but she started walking days before the more thorough evaluation, so she now only qualifies for once a month. I’m still excited about her doing this once a month because it is such a gift to have a trained physical therapist see her monthly to be able to let us know if there ends up being any red flags. But also the facility is such a blast. Poor Little P had to join us there for the evaluation and wasn’t allowed to play on the slides, ladders, trampolines, or in the ball pit!

I feel so grateful that these services are available to children who need them and even more grateful that our Sweet P qualified! I’m looking forward to watching all of her progress this year and know she is just going to keep learning and growing and look forward to sharing more as we continue.