Journey of discovery

Having the baby is the easy part....the rest is truly a journey of discovery.

At the speech and hearing clinic I was advised to provide her with visuals that indicate the routine. I bought flashcards and put those up around the house – action words and names of things were attached to double sided tape and put up all around my brand new house. I wasn’t concerned about the impact on the walls or the décor. My house became a learning lab of visual stimuli to help massage the brain and stimulate speech and language acquisition.

Discovery – when it comes to your child, décor takes second place to functionality. It’s up, she sees it, we can say the words and demonstrate the actions – that’s my interior design standard and I’m sticking with it!

So with the PDD-NOS diagnosis what comes next? I must confess, I spent the first few weeks going through the ups and downs of ‘ah-ha, well now it makes sense why we had this but not this’ and the pain and confusion of “so what does this mean? How can I help her? Will she be alright.”  It is a journey but I chose to be committed to being optimistic.   
                                                                                              
Yes, they gave it a name. Yes, I understood what it meant in terms of the blank look and having to say things in multiple ways. But oh, now came the pain of figuring out how to help her and help myself. How to communicate to others the basis of babbling or the echolalia…all real signs that might have meant something to me if I had been aware of the whole Autism spectrum thing.

For me the label was not a problem. I remember telling one parent the diagnosis and the response was “ I don’t like labels”.  You know what, you don’t have to like the label but you sure ‘nuff can’t treat or resolve a problem if you don’t know what it is. By giving it a name, I had new found power. I knew, to some degree, what I was dealing with and truly, the Lord was at work because now, all of my formal training in a seemingly unrelated area became the resource that guided my actions.

Discovery – other people’s issues are just that their issues. You’ve got to do this journey in a manner that is comfortable for you and likely to achieve the results you’re looking for. The goal for us not simply comfort. It’s speech development and understanding how this child is differently gifted.

First things first – I told my pediatrician of the diagnosis and was referred to the Maryland Child Find program. That’s the infant and toddlers program for children with developmental delays and other challenges. What luck! As I discovered perhaps two years later, Maryland is one of the few states with a robust infant and toddler program.

We were scheduled for an assessment…another round of testing (games as far as my daughter was concerned). The results were the same…you could see, hear, and feel the confusion and the obvious ‘what are you saying?’look. This time we got even more specific information that informed the recommendations for therapy.

Discovery – early intervention is REALLY a huge key.  Having already followed the recommendations received at the speech and hearing test with the flash cards for stimuli, I was ready for some new guidance.

With each new piece of information, every milestone that she reaches and achieves, every milestone that goes unchecked presents an opportunity for a new journey of discovery.