Testing and More Testing

I have so much to update! It's been busy around here lately. I just got back from Utah on Monday night and then worked Tuesday and Wednesday. I will post about our fun trip soon. :)

I wanted to post about Preston though. Kyle and I took him to the University of Washington Childhood Development Center for an evaluation. We signed up with them back in January (b/c of our concerns with his development/behavior and his physician referred us to them). It's normally a 6-9 month wait to get it, but luckily we got in in just a couple of months. It will take 4 different Monday's of testing/evaluating/questioning before we are finished. Our first visit was last Monday and it was from 8:20am until 12:30! Long day. Preston wanted to go home. He kept saying "done" and "bye" to leave. They first had a psychologist evaluate him. I was in the room with him filling out this ginormous questionnaire and survey. Kyle was behind a 2-way window with another lady observing. They would just have Preston complete simple tasks and time him on how long it took him to do it. They would see if he could point out the right pictures when named, play with different items (like imitate play) and other things. They even gave him a snack to see how he did with that. It was interesting to see what they asked him to do. I thought he did fine. We don't find out what the results are until a few more weeks.

Then we waited for over an hour before our next appt for a medical evaluation. (They had a lame play area for the kids. Maybe Children's hospital would be better...I don't know, but we were itching to go.) There were two doctors and a premed student that visited with us (in this tiny, tiny room- we were squished!). One doctor went into another room behind a 2-way window and observed Preston. The other doctor asked us a million questions about Preston from birth until now, all our parents, siblings, etc and their health/learning abilities. We later found out that the doctor working with us is LDS. We were glad to know that. He was very nice. The premed student "tried" playing with Preston. He was tired and wanted to leave so at first he clung to me and didn't want to play. Then he perked up and they were playing and reading books together. After all the questions, they checked Preston out and watched him run, climb stairs, walk on a balance beam and other things. The other doctor came back from the other room and they talked to us about what they thought. They didn't see signs of Autism and thought his movements were within normal (Preston is pretty stiff with some of his movements). They agreed that he had a speech delay, but thought cognitively he is fine (he already knows all his ABC's and numbers and can count!) They thought he was a bit uncoordinated, but still within normal for his age and that would improve over time. This was promising to hear. We go back next week for a parent interview, then the next week for a speech pathologist evaluation and then the following week for an overall review from all their findings. We'll be glad to have this over with, but I think we are both glad we are doing it now. We live in a good area for this kind of help and our school district we live in is also has great resources. Preston may qualify for preschool through the school district and if he does then he will start that in the fall after he turns 3 yrs old. Until then, we still have the speech pathologist come to our house weekly and work with him. We also are now taking Preston to a preschool once a week to get more social interaction with other kids. And so far he loves it. It's a preschool through The Little Red Schoolhouse- that is where the speech pathologist comes from so that is how we found out about it. I had a hard time with all of this a couple weeks ago. I was probably in denial about it thinking he would snap out of it. But then the SLP said it could take a while and that got me all depressed. I didn't want to deal with it anymore and wanted a "normal" child, but I have to think of what is best for Preston and try to get him what he needs.