10/17/09

My little girl turned THREE this week! I can hardly believe it! We had a great time celebrating with family at Chuck E. Cheese the night before, a wonderful day with friends the day of and a happy little girl who LOVED opening all of her presents!

I went to an eligibility meeting for Lily that evaluated her to see if she qualified for state services. We went over all of her scores from all the testing that she had had done. She did not qualify for special education (wouldn't have put her in that anyway), she did not qualify for OT services (no surprise there), she did not qualify for speech services (shocking to me) and because of her cognitive scores they were on the fence as to whether or not they would be giving her any kind of services at all! The speech therapist really went to bat for Lily (I initially did not like her at all in previous meetings, but sometimes a hard ass comes in handy! Actually she was quite nice to me during the meeting and it was great to hear everything she had to say, I have to say I agreed with her on most everything). In the end it was Lily's diagnosis of autism that got her services. Without it, she would not have qualified. This is very sad to me. She's come VERY far and I am so proud of all that she has accomplished, but she still has so far to go. What is wrong with the state? She so clearly needs services. How many slip through the cracks? What if I had not gotten Lily diagnosed?
We put together her IEP (individualized education plan) and I was very happy with it. We set up all the goals that we would like for Lily to achieve as well as giving input as to how Lily learns best to give her teachers something to work with. They told me she qualified for an inclusion class that is very close to home, yay!

Lily will be starting preschool on monday! We checked out the school and it seems perfect. I heard wonderful things about their preschool program.
Lily will be the only child in the class that is on the spectrum (there is one other but they are part time), there are 5 typical kids and 5 developmentally delayed kids, with 3 teachers. Lily loved it there and threw a tantrum when it was time to leave :) I spoke with her teacher at length and she was very surprised Lily didn't qualify for speech, especially since her IEP has 2 speech related goals. She told me that she would basically be pushing Lily through the back door for her to get some extra help with the speech therapist there. I will either have her go 3 or 4 days a week, depending on how she does. I'd love her to just go M-W and have off th/fri, but I'm thinking this may be really good for her, so I'll just see how it goes.

One other great thing that Lily has been doing: today she watched herself in a video and said(a few times)"Hey, that's me!", which is fantastic that she did not refer to herself as "Lily".