Jack Kaden

So. I bitched, I threatened, I cajoled, heck I kicked up enough dust that someone from EI actually noticed and we finally (3 months later) had our speech and feeding evaluation this past Saturday.

There is a dirty secret about EI evals…. never.sound.optimistic. This is harder than it sounds because, clearly, we think Jack is a super genius. But the fact of the matter is, if you don’t make the situation sound really craptastic than you’re not going to get the services you need. We learned this the hard way when he came home from the NICU at 0 days adjusted (or 3 months old). He had his first evaluation and the woman doing it said that he was “just fine for a newborn” and I was all “well of course, have you seen him? I mean, he’s a rockstar - etc.etc.” Guess what happened? No services. But the minute I was like…”well he is 9 MONTHS OLD and isn’t rolling over.” at the next evaluation, well he got services.

So anyway, I was fully prepared to make it sound like Jack couldn’t eat all. I went shopping for all of his least favorite foods (pretty much everything, other than yogurt), I was set to make our case. And then the Evaluator was an hour late for his eval and the kid was starving and so I made him his favorite lunch that doesn’t consist of yogurt, Dr. Praeger’s fish sticks and potato pancakes and thought to myself, “shit, we’re never going to get services, he’s going to scarf this down.” - and he did. And the evaluator watched him as he stuffed his face and then refused to swallow. She watched our normal routine of holding his head, sweeping out everything from his mouth and trying again. She watched him hold string cheese in his mouth for 20 minutes. She watched him stuff about 10 goldfish in his mouth and not chew. And she said, “why of course he needs services, he must be starving all the time, he’s not swallowing anything.” and then I felt even more guilty. More guilty that I didn’t just go out and get him services myself while waiting for the stupid state to catch up. Guilty that I couldn’t figure out another way to get EI to actually pay attention to us.

Consider this lesson officially learned.

Oh, and he qualified for speech as well. He has no words and apparently he’s supposed to have between 8 and 10? And he only babbles monosyllabic-ly? Fuck.

So the good news is we get services. The bad news is, we need services.