We started the process of changing Early Intervention service coordinators & getting Sean physical and occupational therapy evaluations. When his initial evaluation was completed, Sean was doing everything and 2 week old should be doing & then some. What a 2 week old should be doing is pretty much nothing except eating & pooping. Yup.... we had that covered.
As everyone knows, I've been really worried about Sean's head & neck control. Everyone agrees that it's so strange for Sean to just stop lifting up his head. Especially since he stopped before his surgery. He has started to do it a little bit again, but I'm still very concerned about it. Plus occupational & physical therapies can only be good for him. They won't hurt.
I got in touch with Thursday's Child (agency providing Sean's services) to ask what the procedure was and to get help with the form our service coordinator, Miss. R., had sent me. This led me down a seemingly endless path of red tape. I'm still very new to navigating early intervention and every time someone told me something, it seemed to contradict everything else I had been told. After being given her number, I called Mrs. B at Early Intervention quality control for the city to go over what it was I wanted to do and how I needed to go about doing it. She informed that I needed to get a justification for evaluation from Sean's feeding therapist, complete the form (name & address) for consent to the evals, and any other supporting information I could get. So I got a letter from Sean's pediatrician confirming the diagnosis of hypotonia (low muscle tone) and recommending the evals. I also let Mrs. B know who our new service coordinator would be. She also said that our old/current service coordinator would have to file both the change of service coordinator form and the request for evals. After all the forms & supporting documents were faxed to the service coordinator and then sent off to the city for approval.
Because quality control was involved, Sean's request for evals was approved in less than 6 hours. 6 hours! We were told that it could easily take a month for that kind of request to be approved by the city. I am left bewildered by all of the circles I have had to go in in order to ensure that Sean received the services that a) he's entitled to & b) that he needs.
I wish I could describe my thoughts with regard to the city red tape. I guess the easiest way to describe it is that some schmuck that works for the city decides something isn't working efficiently. So he changes it without regard for how that change is going to affect ever other facet of the operation. After he realizes that the change is not working the way he planned, he chooses not to change to back & start over, but instead to fix everything else around the 1st mistake. Making for an even bigger clusterfuck. Does that even make any sense?
Yesterday I had plans to go visit my grandparents with the kids. It's been a while since we've seen them for something fun and I knew Meredith would enjoy herself as would we all. I decided to leave right after M got out of school in the hopes that she'd nap in the car. Meredith basically told me to kiss her butt; she wasn't napping. Ok no big deal right? By the time we got to my grandparents' neighborhood both kids were screaming in the car. I pulled into the 1st garage & parked. I got the kids out & headed to their house because I was about to drive right into a wall if I had to listen to the symphony of whining & crying going on behind me.
We had a nice time, but I think it was even more special for Meredith. I think this was the first time she actually realized that she could have more than one "ema". Granted she called my grandmother "mema", but you get the idea. Until now having more than one grandma was pretty foreign to her. My mother doesn't live close so Meredith never sees her. My grandmother isn't right around the corner so again we don't her as often as we probably should and Rob's grandmother lives in Florida so Meredith doesn't see her either. So the fact that I was saying "great grandma" was really strange to her because now she could put another face to the word "grandma".
It's amazing to watch the wheels turn in Meredith's head. It's amazing to think that just a few months ago Meredith really couldn't reason those kind of things. She couldn't understand how it was possible to have more than 1 "ema" or "mema". As she grew more comfortable and remembered that she knew this person, she had quite the silent conversation with her "mema". It was if she was saying "thank you for allowing me to do this at my pace."
Then we went to have lunch & both kids had meltdowns. I also had a meltdown, but I took mine outside where I could call Rob and curse about how both kids hate me and that's why they continue to gang up on me. I just felt bad for the people trying to eat around us. It also didn't help that it was hot as Hades in there. Then I went back & conned my kid into eating food. We went back upstairs to spend some more time before Rob came to meet us. It was a very nice time and Meredith came away with a new found understanding of family.
And here are some random fall pictures because I just don't have the energy to fit them all in somewhere.
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