Today was our official review of all of the assessments and B's plan for treatment. At this point, it's really too soon to tell much about his prognosis or response to therapy. Still, they collected and presented the data.
First: the ugly: According to their "tests", he is only about 5 months old developmentally. They recommended a four year intensive plan to try to catch him up. Four years... ready for kindergarten around age 7. Gulp.
The bad: He needs the maximum amount of therapy they offer - 40 hours per week, 6 days a week.
The good: He does have some encouraging skills. He responds extremely well to social reinforcement and they are "excited" and "optimistic" about his potential. And, they think we as parents have "what it takes" to make this work. In fact, they are so confident in my abilities that I am being rewarded with double the amount of time typically required for parent-delivered therapy and almost double the number of goals. Also, his external assessments by a psychologist and the school district both gave him a much higher developmental score (the same score in fact) so it could be very likely that their testing is skewed much too low. I personally am quite sure that he functions at a much, much higher level than 5 months.
It was a bit of a sucker punch in the gut but I still feel encouraged. We'll have a much better sense of his potential outcome in our next meeting (end of December). In the meantime, I plan to work my butt off so we can blow them away with his progress.
And here we are with another night of crying when I put him to bed. Tonight, he took it to a new level and threw all of his blankets, lovies and pacifier out of the crib. I went in once but after he did it again, I decided it was a negative behavior that shouldn't be reinforced by my attention (I'm getting the hang of this). He's now whining off and on and staring down at the stuff he threw (thank you video monitor). He has been in bed for an hour and 20 minutes but who's counting?
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