Speech Therapy

We have been on the wait list at Shands (University of Florida) to get Ethan into their program for speech therapy. They called yesterday around noon and said they had a cancellation and wanted to know if we could come in. I jumped at the chance and we went. Jake was even able to get off of work a little early to join us, which was really nice since I had a lot of paperwork to fill out and that would've been hard to do by myself with Ethan.

We met with a really nice, young therapist and a student. They basically just asked Jake and I a lot of questions about what he is able to and not able to do. Then at the end they went over the results with us. He is around 4 months behind and delayed in his expressive speech. They recommend therapy for a greater than 3 month delay. She would like him to do 2 half hour sessions a week. (All of this is stuff that my awesome friend Megan has already told us, this just officially confirmed everything.) There is a federally funded program called "Early Steps" for kids that are under 3 years old where they will pay for speech therapy. The therapist recommended that I contact them immediately to get into the program (which I did yesterday, but had to leave a message). She said he will probably need to be tested in other areas such as physical therapy and occupational therapy in order to get into that program. Shands is an Early Steps provider so now we are "on the list" waiting for a biweekly appointment time at Shands. In the mean time they did give us some exercises that we can do with him at home, which I found really great...helped me to not feel completely helpless!

We are making progress in getting him and us help, it is just a lot of red tape and phone calls. Thankfully God decided that I needed to be a stay at home mom for awhile...I smile now as I think, "all things happen for a reason" (sometimes we just can't see why things happen right away, but if we are lucky they become clear later on). Thanks to everyone for your prayers, advice, and concerns for Ethan! We are truly blessed with an amazing kid and can't wait for the world to hear what is going on in that head!