Reality

This morning we got the results of Korben’s evaluation. Back story, he’s three years old and I first noticed he didn’t make eye contact at five months. He is very interactive, once you get his attention that is, but didn’t have very many words. His main form of communication was gestures and grunting/yelling. He entered speech therapy at a year and a half. Though I asked his doctor about possible autism, there were never any other symptoms or characteristics to suggest autism. So, speech therapy was the only sort of therapy he had until he got passed up for special education at the local preschool. Before we even moved out here I made an appointment with the school district to get re-evaluated. Yesterday, the school called to tell me he qualified for cognitive and speech, and they were still tallying his test scores up but that he could start school later in February. Back to this morning, his new doctor says he did test on the Autism Spetrum. To be clear, I expected and suspected this for a while now, so this was in no way a surprise. I am proud of myself, I didn’t find it shocking or sucky, the news. I feel happy that we finally have an official diagnosis to get him the therapy and assistance he needs.


My husband left with a ton of paperwork to read over, fill out, research. We have homework to watch on YouTube tonight. No movie nights for a few days. I will download a book for us to read that was recommended, as well. Before we left that meeting, the speech therapist had called us to make an appointment for Korben for next week. Yes! We also have a tour of his new classroom next week. I feel we are on the ball with this. We came into this as prepared as you could be, I think. The saddest part in all of this is that he is labeled (for the time being) as “Non-Verbal.” Though he has words, which his vocabulary has exploded in the last month or two, he doesn’t have active use of those words. For example, if asked his name, he couldn’t tell you. But I’m confident he will get to that point with therapy, which we are on the list for already. He went from a vocabulary of maybe 75 words to at least 150, if not more, in the span of two months from watching Wow English on YouTube. Anyone reading this who has a little one needing speech therapy, I highly recommend watching Wow English (WattsEnglish/Steve and Maggie). It may or may not help, but I truly believe this was the turning point in his language development.


For today, I’m going to do what I always do, work, write, edit, network. Tonight, my husband and I will conquer the homework we have together.


Should anyone have any advice or resources you’d like to share, feel free to share in the comments. Even if I don’t need/use them or already have it, there may be others reading who would.


Thank you!