I'm surprised how long its been since I've updated this blog. Wow! Years!
But I've decided that its time to update, a little at least.
We have had a lot go on in the last few years. We decided to move to Kalispell for me to go to culinary school. This was the fall of 2013, so we up and moved. It was super quick and although everything was figured out for my school, I didn't figure a lot out when it comes to my kids, especially Ellina, she has been doing very well and at that point we were taking a break from therapies, which for her is very normal, she does great for awhile, we take a break and she starts to fall behind and needs the therapy again. Every time we stop, we hope that this time she won't need it again but in most cases she does.
So, we got Ellina and Eliza enrolled in Head Start, Gareth in 1st grade, and found a small 2 bedroom house to rent in a decent school district.
For Ellina, in head start, they almost immediately put her in speech therapy. I asked for a PT and OT evaluation, and was told that they would get right on that. One of Ellina's first challenges with our move was the noise, it is quite a bit louder in a town with an airport and she wasn't handling it well, any loud noise would result in screaming and terror on her face, which really was sad. I was told by her speech therapist to explain to her that it wasn't scary and that she would be fine. But I quickly discovered that I was invalidating her fears and it didn't feel right. So I learned to just hold her, help her to cover her ears and explain her her that I was there for her. Thankfully, after a decent amount of time, the noises didn't phase her anymore. I started to notice that she was starting to favor her leg, and normally her PT would notice long before I did, so with a little bit of pushing, I got a PT evaluation done at head start, I got the results and it said "Ellina is small for her age but is just fine" in about ten paragraphs, no mention of her leg whatsoever! I was pretty upset, and with my insanely busy school schedule it took a bit before I was able to find a second pediatric PT. Turns out that Libby (the tiny town where we moved from) has some amazing therapists. Kalispell is much bigger and there just aren't very many therapists for the population, when I called the places that did have therapists they would have long waiting lists. I finally found a PT that did home based therapy and she came over and evaluated Ellina. Within a few minutes she had her qualified for therapy so we set that up.
So I'll be continuing this later :)
