Woodstone Prairie

 Yesterday turned out to be at absolutely crazy day!

Several weeks ago I made an appointment for R to have an assessment, I thought the appointment was today (Friday). The same developmental neuropsychologist who evaluated M last year, was going to evaluate R to see if she qualified for developmental disability services. In Colorado having FASD alone isn’t enough to qualify for DD services, you also have to have an IQ lower than 70… Most kids with FASD don’t. They can be seriously affected by their prenatal exposure to alcohol, but it’s not always reflected in their IQ score.

So anyway… I’d been trying to get R in for months (this neuro-psych is an old friend from my FASD days, but is VERY busy) and finally had Friday, 10:30 down on the calendar. So yesterday, Thursday, about 11:00 the phone rang… I was in the middle of scrubbing the kitchen floor, the kids were dressed in stay-at-home clothes, and R’s hair was pretty much a wild tangle… it was ”Mc” (the neuro-psych) on the phone… where were we? After some discussion about “I thought it was tomorrow”, “no I have it on the schedule for today”, and “this is the only appointment time I have available for weeks”, I told Mc that we were leaving the house immediately and would be there VERY soon.

I grabbed my disheveled, mismatched kids, left the ammonia water sitting in puddles on the kitchen floor and left the house. Thirty fast, tense (M doesn’t do quick transitions well, and was very agitated during the drive!)  minutes later we ran into Mc’s office and got started.

The good news/bad news is that R does qualify for DD services… The interesting part is that, although she scored just a few points higher than M on the IQ test, she scored many times higher than him on the adaptive behavioral scale. Which seems to me to say that she’s functioning at a very high level for her delays. Honestly I don’t think most people, even those who have known her for awhile, would guess that she has the level of disability she does… She is quite an amazing kid.

After we left Mc’s office we had just enough time to grab some lunch and get to our co-op class. It was a great class, on bones, and the kids both enjoyed it. Then all the kids from the class met at McD’s playplace to play for awhile.

From there we went to Sam’s and Wal-Mart, getting groceries and supplies for the co-op class I’m teaching today, and the family get-together tomorrow.

We got home at dinnertime…. tired and cranky, with at least one of us (me!) wanting nothing more than a quiet evening at home.

But instead we popped a take and bake pizza in the oven and headed to our across-the-back-fence neighbor’s house. They are moving to TX in a couple of days, and she needed some help with her livestock. They are also a homeschooling family, have horses and goats, and since her dh is on the road most of the time she, like me, is mostly on her own when it comes to barn chores.

Finally we made it home again, ate some pizza and went to bed…

I’m hoping to go no further than my mailbox today.

Update on M: Ok…. so things may not be as bad as I thought.

I talked to the pediatrician last night… She is a very good doctor AND has a son with diabetes, so I trust her feedback about the possible metabolic issues. She doesn’t seem that concerned about the results from the blood work. She thinks the slightly high blood sugar might just be a “normal” high reading, something transient, not necessarily an indication that M’s blood sugar is always high.

She’s a little more concerned about the high triglycerides… but doesn’t recommend (yet) changing M’s diet to try to bring them down. She is going to talk to M’s cardiologist today and get his input.

Both her and the pdoc want to repeat these labs every 3-6 months for awhile, which works for me.