ChezPerky

The triplets are all getting therapy through our county’s early intervention program. They have both a general special education/developmental therapist and a speech therapist working with them. The great news is that the triplets are doing great and have reached the vast majority of their developmental milestones. The therapists were kind of curious about some of the idiosyncracies in their development, though… they don’t really imitate, for example… we’ve been doing sign language with them since they were 6 months old and now, at 23 months old, they don’t imitate a single sign, nor do they respond to a single sign. They used to play peek-a-boo, but only in their high chairs – not elsewhere (the girls just recently started doing it elsewhere, too).

They are also pretty far behind in their speech/language milestones, enough that at their 15 month appointment, their general pediatrician noted that we should get them evaluated and get them speech therapy services ASAP.

Since we happen to have an “in” with an excellent developmental pediatrician (for the J-man), I ran the therapists’ questions by Dr. S. His first recommendation was to continue with the speech therapy, but also to get the triplets’ speech/language development formally assessed on either the Mullen Scales of Early Learning, or similar after a solid 6-8 months of speech therapy (that would be… now). He had a few other suggestions, and did say he’d be happy to see the triplets if we thought that would be beneficial (this is a great gift from him – he’s not currently accepting new patients). He said we should definitely talk more after we get the assessment. This all seemed perfectly reasonable.

So… we started the assessments on Friday and finished all except Ellie’s receptive language assessment, which I’m not in the least bit concerned about. The girls, unsurprsingly, came out just about where we expected them to – about 6 months behind expressively (which means they’ve made huge progress since they started speech therapy in January) and only a few months behind receptively (assuming Ellie comes out where we expect her to once we finish her receptive assessment next week).

Sam’s assessment was more significant, however. He tested out as 4 months for expressive language and 11 months for receptive language. Wow.

I talked with Ye Olde Developmental Pediatrician and did tell him that Sam’s 2 year check up with our regular pediatrician is next month, reminded him that we’re still doing weekly speech therapy with all the triplets, and asked him what he suggests we do from here. He said that he thinks it’s important that we remain vigilant with the intensive speech therapy and he suggested we meet and talk more after their 2 year check up. That certainly seemed reasonable. I trust YODP, and I trust our general pediatrician. So I believe we won’t be led astray by either of them (and it happens that they are former practice partners and good buddies of each other, so they trust each other, too).

I’m quite certain this will resolve over time and that we’ve got the right professionals on our team. It’s just… more stuff to do.

Well, it’s always gotta be something, right? I wasn’t having nearly enough fun these days anyway.

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