We are members of the OPAT program (Oklahoma Parents as Teachers) and our parent educator, Marilyn, suggested we have SoonerStart come out and do a development assessment on Bug to see if she qualifies to have them come on a regular basis to work with her and get her better caught up.
SoonerStart has a free developmental intervention program designed to work on children's delayed areas. To qualify, the child must be younger than 3 and needs to be behind 25% in 2 different fields or 50% in 1 field.
We had Marilyn set up the first meeting with SoonerStart and Bill came as our representative from SoonerStart to do all of our paperwork and ask all the usual questions. He asked things like, "Was she premature?" No. "Where do you feel she's lacking?" Motor skills, not reaching at all and not really interested in toys. "What health conditions, if any, does Rayleigh have?" Epilepsy, nothing else. And so on.
A week later, a couple of women from SoonerStart came to do the developmental assessment to figure out how behind Bug was and if she would qualify for the free program to get her back on track. This visit was also a lot of questions but they also examined and played with Rayleigh. They checked her tracking, her interest, her head/neck/torso strength and her milestones up to date. They asked about her language so far, her eating and sleeping habits, what she enjoys looking at most, how she lets you know what she wants and what we feel she needs work on.
Rayleigh was considered appropriate for her age in all areas except motor skills. Just as we suspected.
She had just turned 7 months old the day they did the evaluation. The evaluation concluded that Rayleigh was 2-4 months behind overall in motor skills. Major things lacking at the time being her gross motor: sitting, crawling position, & raising head during tummy time.
They said that these delays could be from anything. Her Phenobarbital medicine, the seizures, an underlying thing with her epilepsy, or something different all together.
The women said the test showed that she is delayed enough in this area to qualify for a physical therapist to come weekly or however often we choose to work with Rayleigh on her motor skills. They said that Bill would call us that week to get the first meeting with the physical therapist scheduled.
I'd be lying if I said that Michael & I were not disappointed when they left. As parents, we want the best for our baby girl and want her to be as normal (whatever normal is) as possible. We are now devoted to getting her motor skills caught up, by doing whatever it takes!
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