More Good Times

Today Elise had her evaluation with the school district. There was a psychologist, a speech therapist and an occupational therapist reviewing her. She did really well in the evaluation and I think she provided an excellent representation of where her strengths & weaknesses lie. She was definitely autistic, but she demonstrated that she has the ability to learn. She even easily put together a puzzle of a boy where the pieces weren't in separate shapes and without pictures to guide her. She also said animal sounds and signed more a few times. She caught a ball, threw it-up in the air, not to the therapist :p - and kicked it. She also stacked blocks very adeptly. I was proud of her and I think she was really proud of herself. We'll see how the IEP goes. The lady coordinating her IEP is scheduling visits for us to various area preschool programs. I'm excited to see what opportunities there will be for her education.

The reason I feel so positive about the evaluation was because the evaluators only had read her initial reports from 6 months ago. We hadn't really realized how much progress she'd made until we saw that their expectations for her were quite a bit lower than what she demonstrated. It was really nice to have people focused on how far she's come instead of how far she needs to go. They also complimented how well we handle transitioning her. We hadn't realized how adept we were at that until we saw how difficult it was for them to transition her.

Not much else going on today. This evening, Elise wanted to mostly play alone. I think she was tired and, since I was mostly alone with the 3 kids, it was difficult to make a huge effort to involve her. We had moments of connection, but mostly she took a break this evening and did her own thing. Last night she didn't wake the whole night! Let's hope for another night like that.