Thinking & Feeling

“The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.” Horace Walpole

Friday 16 September 2005

Time for school - and therapy

Quinn had his appointment to assess him for school readiness this morning. I dropped him off at 9am, and went back to get him at 11am. He seems to have had a lovely time with the psychologist, working and playing etc.

We still have to go back in a few weeks to get the full report and feedback, but she has already said he is ready for school and it's fine for us to send him. It's nice that my feeling has been validated, and that it's not me 'pushing' him. She also pointed out that we don't even have to apply for an exemption, because although he is on the young side he IS in the acceptable age group to start grade one. I started talking to him about getting school uniforms etc on the way home - exciting, and more than a little scary! :)

Griffin has been going to weekly physio play session for 2 terms now and the physio is happy with his progress so he will be ending at the end of the term. He may go on to have some (Occupational Theraphy) OT too if it's deemed necessary. He is also having weekly speech therapy sessions now, which he also loves and his speech is improving nicely. Interestingly his speech problem is purely a muscle tone issue (as with the physio), he was tested at having sentence construction, comprehension and grammar use of a 6-7 year old (he is not yet 4) !

It was picked up through his assessments that his primary problems were lack of confidence rather than real lack of ability, and both 'Doctors' have really helped him with this. He now sees himself as a 'Bog Boy' and will try things even when they are a bit hard, whereas before he would avoid things he didn't think he could do. I am very proud of him, and it's been lovely to see the transformation.

I am wondering if his problem originated at birth as he had a slightly slow and stalled labour and so we were marking time to see if I'd progress further without intervention. When I thought something had happened, I was told to hang in there and wait for the designated time before we checked again (and got possibly got disappointed). As it turned out when it was time for the check I suddenly started pushing and he was out mostly unassisted in 6 minutes, except for his stuck shoulder needing to be dislodged and turned, and he was a bit blue at birth. I am now wondering if he had a bit of oxygen starvation in that time?

Either way he seems to be catching up with the intervention now and has gone from not colouring in at all, or doing very light and half hearted strokes to full colouring in with no white visible through the crayon colour... He is also talking about being interested in trying some of the physical extra murals next year (gymnastics, karate etc) - this year he only wanted to do music.

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