Dancing

Tristan's version of Dancing!

So yesterday we went to talk to the film producer about how Step by Step has helped Tristan. It's a short fundraising documentary that they asked a group of families to appear in. Our problem is a good problem to have, which is looking at Tristan the producer couldn't see anything wrong with him. She was so confused what to ask us when she realized that Tristan was the child that attended Step by Step, we weren't hiding another kid anywhere else! It's hard to articulate but we feel that Tristan is kind of the poster kid for Early Intervention. He was born a preemie and has had intervention since he came home for the hospital. As a result he has worked through all of his delays physically and hasn't had many developmental delays. The lady wanted us to be able to explain exactly how Tristan had benefited from Step by Step and trying to get across that he doesn't have any obvious delays anymore because Early Intervention worked just wasn't cutting it! I don't think we're going to be invited to be in the film : ( His benefit is that he doesn't have any delays because they got to him early- EARLY INTERVENTION PEOPLE!

Today he saw the speech therapist and that went great. She spent the first 30 minutes figuring out what words he knew, what he could questions/commands he could understand, what pronouns he knew, etc. He whizzed through that- she tested him up past 3 years old for vocabulary, etc. She was so impressed with how many words he knew and sentences he could form, usually it's very quiet in her room! Then we worked on his actual speech- how he pronounces words, forms with is mouth, etc. That went well too. She said all of his mispronunciation is age appropriate and easily fixable. So she told me that the Regional Center definitely wouldn't fund therapy for him, but she wants to recheck in three months to just be sure he's progressing with age. She gave me some tips like correcting every time he uses Tristan instead of "I" or "me" and exaggerating the pronunciation of the words he mispronounces. And trying to teach him where the letter is pronounced from- the front or back of his mouth. So we will just hit that hard and hopefully he'll start saying things correctly soon. It's definitely better to not need speech therapy- I think she almost laughed me out of the room! But hey- we were referred.