Our second in-home Early Intervention visit was this past Friday. They sent a prep sheet about our daily and weekly family routines.
I was curious about this meeting. Our family routines are the heartbeat of our daily/weekly/monthly life.
I wasn’t expecting how I’d feel at the end of our hour long interview. Drained.
Being asked to rate how your child’s medical conditions/behavior/gross motor & fine motor skills affect your daily life really starts to bring out the little issues. The ones you ignore day to day because you’re the mom and you would go to hell and back for that mini human.
The questions about my me time and when I get stuff done also caught me off-guard.
The one that kept me up Friday night was “What are your concerns for your child that worry you the most? What keeps you up at night?” Are you really sure you want to open that bag of worms, lady? I’m awesome at worrying something to bits. 🙂
I’m very happy with 9 preliminary “goals” that came out of the meeting. I think it will do a TON for D’s quality of life to start working on these things.
I learned how hard it really is to think that your care/teaching isn’t enough for your child. You would think that lesson would have been made abundantly clear to me in NICU days. I am by no means a “kid” expert. I didn’t babysit. My youngest sister is only 4.5 years younger. My only kid experience was being one. I really appreciated our coordinator taking the time to point out that I was doing great with him and his needing additional therapy was no reflection on my teaching/guiding abilities as a parent.
I’m still a little sad that this is all necessary for him, but I am hopeful that I will enjoy this team and our work together for D’s well being as much as I enjoy working with his NICU follow up and medical team.
Initial recommendation is PT twice a month and Speech/Feeding once a week for the next six months, and then a follow up evaluation to see how things are progressing. We also received a list of where he’s at with various development and some goals and exercises to work on ourselves.
Our next meeting is scheduled for the end of this week and it will be the “goal setting” meeting.