On January 30th we will meet with Skylar's team to assess her progress on her current IFSP goals. She is doing really well - so well I am worried about the team not knowing how to keep helping her, and losing the motivation to help her, which was to enable her to catch up to hearing peers.
She's caught up. SHE'S CAUGHT UP!!!!! She's caught up.
Because - we are hyper vigilant about making sure her technology is working, model language skills at all times, teach new vocabulary, and acoustically outfit our home as much as possible. Her teachers are consistently and beautifully using the FM system, and speech therapy has taught her the pesky high frequency sounds that are hardest for her to hear.
But she will be hard of hearing, nearly deaf actually, her whole life. She will ALWAYS struggle to follow a conversation and have difficulty in loud environments. There will always be people like the 10 year old girl who passed me in my waiting chair at the girls' gymnastics class, not knowing, and said to her mother, "mom, I feel sorry for that little girl with the hearing aids." It broke my heart.
At this meeting there will be a representative of the school district, because soon we will be visiting schools to select where the girls will go to kindergarten. We've been told in no uncertain terms that Skylar will not qualify for speech therapy in kindergarten. My goal is to help the district understand how to provide for her needs through her TOD and audiologist (we don't have AVT in our county). She needs listening skills, language skills, social communication skills, and self-advocacy skills.
Wait - I am already teaching her all four of those. Hmmm. Maybe I could train the TOD! It will be an interesting year :-)
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