The developmental screen

We have a local program called "EC Cares" which does free early intervention for special needs kids. Per the ped's request, we had the evaluator in to look at Shiny and see how she's doing. First take (she has to go back and do a major report for final results) is that Shiny is behind on motor coordination and *vocal* skills, but may even be ahead on her language comprehension. Prime example:

Evaluator (E): "Do you hear her make vowel sounds?" Me: "Well, she tries, and sometimes we get something close, but it isn't what you would normally hear. Let's see if she'll show you." (to Shiny): "Can you say, "Ah?" Shiny: (with mouth open and relaxed) "Uh" (sort of open grunt in back of throat) Me (to Shiny): "Can you say, "Ooo?" Shiny: (with lips pursed)"Uh" (tighter grunt in back of throat) E: "I see what you mean."

So it's clear she understands what I want her to do and what my mouth does to make it happen, but she flat out hasn't figured out how to bring her sound forward through her mouth, rather than nasal-gutteral. I should probably teach her French or German.

The weird thing is that it's all hit and miss. On some things, the evaluator did the same exercise four times and got four different results. There were a couple of things that I *know* Shiny can do that she just wasn't interested in demonstrating.

Socially she's totally on track--but that confounded the test results to a degree because she'd much rather look at the new interesting face than some silly old toy.

But she's definitely not 100% where she needs to be--everything requires conscious effort on her part, nothing is "natural" or "easy".

And of course, this morning I weighed her to discover she'd only put on 3 ounces in 10 days. But this evening when I weighed her, she was up 6 ounces from the morning. Go figure. Even though she took a four hour nap today.

I got stuff done during that nap, including this:

Jenrose