Success!!

On two fronts there is success.  First I'll update on my 30-day challenge.  I actually got up and worked out this morning.  I burned 104.3 calories in about 20 minutes.  Mostly upper body today.  I kicked butt in boxing!  If I get up tomorrow, I will be back on track for my week next week.  Bonus points if I can survive the baseball game on Sunday without eating so much.  We'll see about that. Ha!  They say winter is bad for diets because not as much exercise - not for me.  It's baseball season and having 10 games worth of tickets to use up.  That's what's gonna get me!

My other success story is about M.  In May when he turned 3 the Dr. recommended speech for him.  She thought maybe he could be behind a little because he's not wear a lot of 3 year olds are and a lot of his words are his own language that only we understand.  So we went through our school district.  Turns out he's low average.  Not low enough to qualify for services but low enough that he's not average with his speech.  Because he's so clingy and mom oriented, we went through his evaluation in two parts.  The first part was articulation and M cooperated and did really well in participating and listening to Miss A. By the end of the hour, he started to get easily distracted and frustrated.  Partly because the questions were harder and partly because he'd just been on his best behavior for a whole hour and it was wearing him out. So we came back a couple days later.  His cooperation went out the window and he didn't really want to do any of it.  Miss A scored what he did do and he still wasn't low enough to qualify for district service.  There was one more test that I had the option of M taking given that he wasn't cooperating.  My choices were try to finish that day, come back another day or call it quits altogether.  I decided that since he wouldn't qualify even if he bombed that one test, that there was no use in putting him through a stressful time of "playing games."  I still think he's on the lower side, but even since the middle of June his language has exploded.  He's trying to put more words together in a sentence doing mostly 3 words sometimes 4, sometimes 2 words at a time.  He cooperates and is receptive to repeating words and sounds which is a good sign.  I'll give it until late fall.  If he's not improving, I'll contact a private speech therapist that our medical insurance will pay for.  They don't have as low of standards so he has a better chance of qualifying for speech therapy if needed.

I'm not trying to push something that's not there.  I just want M to have the best possible chance to learn all he needs now at an early age and before he starts school, than for a delay that goes untreated to cause problems once he's in school.  My husband and I were in the middle about whether he really needed a speech evaluation anyway.  But since the pediatrician recommended it, we thought why not.  They are trained in this and can give us a good marker as where he is at.  So we will see what the next few months show as far as M learning to talk.  Hopefully he won't need speech therapy at all and we can just continue working with him at home like we already are.

I guess the success part of this story is that M did his best and we learned some new ways to work with him.  Oh and I successfully brought him to his evaluation with his cousin L.  She wanted to answer the questions and play the games too so that was tricky but we did it.

*for the record, my 30-day challenge is on day 11.