This morning, we had our check-up with the Monster’s developmental pediatrician.

We have this meeting roughly every six to nine months – it’s a good spot for us to talk about what therapies he ought to be getting and to go over our concerns.  As you can imagine, this meant the creation of a laundry list last night, and then trying desperately to remember what everything meant while at the doctor’s office today.

Unlike our past visits, a lot of this visit was actually positive – he’s made a decent amount of progress since the last visit (at the very beginning of the school year) and there’s a lot to be very happy about.  Of course, there’s also the back-sliding in some ways, and those were the concerns we were focused on.

What going to the pediatrician helps with, really, is having a medical professional going over our concerns with his progress and putting into her reports those things that will help the Monster, but that the school district hasn’t really been willing to do.  For instance: the Monster has speech thrice a week, two pull-outs and one push-in, but all of those are group sessions.  His social skills are coming along fine, but his enunciation needs work, something that he demonstrated while at the doctor’s.  She’s putting in her report that she feels strongly that he needs at least some one-on-one time to work on those communication issues.

She was good about reminding us as to what things would be better discussed with his behavioral therapist (mostly centering on the potty training and other maturity things), but was willing to put us into the queue for feeding therapy, given that the wife’s still concerned about the lack of diversity in his diet.  (I’d rather concentrate on his OT and speech.)

The shocker, to me, was when I asked about whether she thought ABA would be a help.  Her thought is that it’s probably not mandated for his case – that he seems to be already handling the things ABA would help with – and that she’d rather re-evaluate down the road to see if some other kind of therapies would be beneficial to him.  (It’s certainly not going to stop me from pushing for ABA coverage being mandated in Maryland, but.)

All in all, it was a good visit.  Granted, she hasn’t read the IEP or looked over his latest ADOS, but we’ll see what her thoughts are when she sends us her findings in a week or two…