So I had to call this blog A2, after all, Alicia deserves her own story under "A". Alicia is our youngest daughter (8 years old). She does have an older sister Hailey, age 10. Alicia is quite an amazing little girl. Alicia was born in March of 2003. While we had some "usual" issues while she was an infant (reflux, colic and having the swing be the main thing that always seemed to settle her down)...we had no idea what the future had in store for us. At 6 months old we started taking her to a physical therapist due to torticollis. For those of you how have not heard of (or don't know about) torticollis, it is: stiff neck associated with muscle spasm, causing lateral flexion contracture of the cervical spine musculature. Now in English for those of us that do not have a highly educated medical degree: it is a condition in which the head is tilted to one side. We had PT (physical therapy) once a week for about 6 months. Each week I would load her up in her carrier and travel to CCMC (Connecticut Children's Medical Center) for our weekly appointment. Still at this point, we didn't see anything "wrong" because this isn't an uncommon medical condition among infants.
As time went on we went to our regular pediatric well-care visits and marked off our milestones as we made them.....until we started not to make each one. We stuck it out, figuring that she was just late in making her milestones, after all this is also common among infants/toddlers. When she didn't hit her sitting up, babbling, walking, "regular" crawling and two-word babbling we knew that we needed to start investigating further. Hence began the various specialists that we would start seeing. We were referred to a Developmental Pediatrician to have Alicia evaluated. The amount of paperwork that you have to fill out before you even get to see the Developmental Pediatrician is very overwhelming. You begin to become an expert in the field of filling out information on when a milestone was/or wasn't made, sleep patterns of your child, tests your child has had (and you can name, spell and write down the exact date and results of each one from memory) and anything and everything about your child. Then came the 2 hour evaluation appointment of speaking with the doctor, going through the history it took you 2 weeks to fill out, the doctor "testing" your child, other specialists watching through a "one way" window, and then asking question after question, after question. This is just the beginning of preparation for making you an expert in the medical history of your child that you will have to repeat for the rest of your life at various medical appointments, evaluations and meetings. After several appointments with the Developmental Pediatrician Alicia was diagnosed as having Global Developmental Delays with Autistic Features. I told my husband that our daughter sounded like a car model. She was delayed across the board in all aspects (speech, gross/fine motor skills, all things developmental). So the next step was to start getting "services" for our child to help her catch up with where she needed to be. We started receiving Birth to Three services that entailed a special education teacher, a physical therapist and an occupational therapist coming out to the house every week to work with Alicia. They did various things with her in terms of working on speech and fine/gross motor skills. Things would seem to get "better" for a time and then back to where we were. Alicia went right out of Birth to Three and began preschool (in an integrated regular peer and special education program) the day she turned 3 years old......more to follow soon.....
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