Gold star

You know all the times when you feel like you are a terrible parent? Well, maybe it’s just me, I don’t know. However, today I am feeling the opposite! After her first official swim lesson without me, Katie said that she is NOT going to swim again and she was quite insistent on that for a week. This is rather strange, as usually she likes it, and looks forward to Mondays. While we decided that if she doesn’t want to, she doesn’t have to, I just really want her to learn how to swim. Katie has been throwing fits about getting water on her ears while washing her head lately. So I decided to stop at the sports store to see if they have better ear plugs that what we have already, because those she refuses as well. They didn’t, but they did have swimming caps. It’s pink, and purple, of course, and while it looks totally silly on Katie, it is tight enough to cling to her head. I put it on her at home, and poured a bit of water on her head so that she would know that her ears are safe. This was enough to convince her that swimming lessons might just work out OK. Once we went inside, I told her teacher what I thought the problem was, asked her to keep reminding Katie that her ears would not get wet, and handed over my hesitant daughter. I saw Katie get really upset when Erica asked her to float on her back, and then I saw Erica touch her hands to Katie’s ears clearly explaining to her that she’ll be protected by the cap. Luckily Katie is rather trusting, so she laid back. I could see her body go from rigid with tension to completely relaxed as she realized that there is no water in her ears, and from then on she happily did everything that was asked of her, and played while waiting her turn. She was also thrilled after the lesson to see that her hair is dry. On the way back she told us that she is definitely going back next week, and all the weeks after that. SUCCESS!

Language test

Simon has two speech therapists, not because we don’t like one, but because we need a fairly specific appointment times, so when we upped his sessions from two to three a week, his regular therapist wasn’t available at a convenient time. Anyway, one of them quit last month, so Si got a new one. That is important, because the new one had to read Simon’s file in order to see what he needs to work on, and it turns out that he has completely met his goals that were set a year and a half ago. So they decided to do a new assessment, to set goals, and have a benchmark. They do the test in two sessions, as it’s really too much for a 4 year old to do at once, and today they did “language assessment”. We can’t really get much out of Simon on what it is, but he said that ms Sheeba would tell him something, and he would have to point to the correct picture. From what I’ve gathered, it’s probably a receptive language test(maybe PPVT?), but I’ll have to ask about it. Well, the therapist was so excited that she called Stacey right after. They look for a score of 80 to 120, and Simon scored 135! This is in the 99th percentile of his peers! So even though his enunciation is terrible, now we know that he doesn’t miss out on what people are saying. The second part of the test is in a week, and I am guessing it’s going to be expressive language. We’ll see what the results are there