IEP

I had Asa's  second ever IEP meeting on Thursday. This time last year I was super prepared and super nervous! This year felt more relaxed! I woke up Thursday morning and still felt short of breath and panicy though.

I see Asa's teacher every day and his therapist weekly. We chat and toss around ideas all the time. I guess the IEP was good to get all of ideas in writing. Last week we were tossing around ideas for PT goals and I was afraid that we had the bar set to low last year. We've had crawling as a PT goal since he was little bitty. And guess what, at 4 years old Asa still isn't close to a crawl! I was very impressed that this years goals include "standing a line for 10 seconds"! WooHoo! I look forward to that day!

His long time OT was very impressed with how far he got in his eval. She said they were scrambling to gather the materials for the next steps of the tests! How fun is that!

And as for speech, Asa has a new SLP. In case you didn't know Asa has no words. Zero! Not even a "mamamama" or "dadadada". And he started speech therapy at 6 months. He's had speech therapy once a week until he was 3. Then last year he had speech twice a week for 30 min each time. Now I'm no expert but if all this work has gotten us nothing then I'm not sure we'll ever get anything. That's why we've started looking at Alternative Adaptive Communication. So far he seems to be doing really well with the PECS cards. One day this week we were in the van on the way home from school when Asa started hugging a card from his set. When I asked him what he had he showed me the "hug" card! How smart! I go in to the school next week for MY PECS training. Seems that there is a set way to use these cards. Asa already gets the idea though so I'm excited!

Oh and Asa won't be moving to another class for a while! Yay! Maybe I should be sad about that but I'm not. Overall, Asa's development was that of a 2 year old at best. And with that in mind I have no problem keeping Asa in his safe, happy class. I feel like he has enough struggles so a happy (happier!) 2 hours a day at school is good enough! And his teacher is by no means just a babysitter! They work on numbers and colors and his PECS and PE and art and music! He has it made, I tell you! We are so blessed!