Whew!

We're back from Natalie's assessment at the school district, and Tom and I both think it went well. The three people there, a psychologist, a nurse and a speech path, *LOVED* Natalie (we're not surprised, but it's always fun to see people who get excited about Natalie). Natalie was in fine form, smiling and engaging them throughout the 2-hour assessment. We thought she did well in the assessment, giving them a good idea of what she can do. Natalie used more spoken words than we've heard her use before in one 2-hour session, so that was exciting too.

The assessment results were that, at 35 months of age, Natalie's physical development (gross and fine motor) is 17 months; her adaptive (what she does to take care of herself) is 20 months; her social is 18 months (the reason she scores low in this area is because of her lack of expressive speech); and her cognitive is 24 months.

Her IEP is scheduled for a week from today, at noon (the time was moved to accommodate one of Natalie's therapists), so we'll be madly preparing ourselves for that meeting. We've now met three of the people who will be in the IEP, and we already gave them some of the things we're concerned about, so we're optomistic that the meeting will go well.

We learned today that there is a 4-day program, and a 2-day program for special needs preschool. We had been leaning toward sending her 3 days a week, so now we need to make a decision of whether to send her 2 or 4 days. Today was good, because we got a lot of questions answered that the Regional Center didn't know, and everything is always better when both Tom and I are there, because I can't forget to tell Tom something that was mentioned, and he can ask questions I didn't think of.

Thanks for your continued prayers for this process.