Thursday, July 28, 2005

What Is a Car??? And other inane questions

Today Mr 5 had his assessment for PSD funding today, the psychologist was a very nice fellow who really related well with Mr 5. We did the test at the Sunbury and Macedon Ranges Special School which is a great, friendly, "homey" type of school full of smiling faces and happy sounds.
Some of the questions were strange..What is a car? "Has wheels" was the response. How many legs on a cow? "seben (7)" whilst holding up three fingers. What colour are leaves? "ellow" then he changed his answer to "gween". The matching of the block patterns went fine until he had to match patterns from bi colored blocks then it got hard. The picture matching went ok, but he thought a fork and a paint palette go together, and a car is the same as a boat, as well as other strange match offs. At the 1/2 hour mark he wanted to go and was fidgety, the marking of the same lines/circle into the same shape (copying) was a task, as he has yet to master a proper pencil grip, he managed a line and a half in the allocated time frame...Good,bad or indifferent...Don't ask me.

The fellow gave me a Vineland test for completion by Mr 5's EIP co ordinator which will be done in conjunction with myself. Usually the child's pre school teacher would do it but given that his teacher has left and the new one has only been there 2 weeks...The co ordinator and I will complete it. This , together, with the cognitive testing carried out today will help decided if he is allowed to attend the special school parttime. Our hope is that he deviates enough from the "dream line " of 68-71 in his scores to allow the assessor to mark him down accordingly. The average of all the scores are compiled to a mean score....Given that the reason we want him at the special school is to augment and not facilitate his entire formal education goes in our favor a bit, I hope. If he was scoring too high in the test we would not have been given the Vineland test for completion ,I am told ,so there is hope.

Mr Almost 3 has diarrhea, not really bad ,but suffice to say that everythings passing through within a few hours of digestion. I think it is gardia (not for the weak stomached)as Miss 8 had it as a baby and it needs a prescription...But the doctor who diagnosed it in Miss 8 was an "old school" doc who knew by the smell and nappy contents what is was. But now, if it persists, I will need to get "samples" and even freeze some of them (don't even ask how I do this, you just don't wanna know) just to find out what an "old school" doctor with many years experience could tell me in one consultation. Not taking anything away from "newbie" doctors, but I think a lot more older docs could take on the teacher/mentor role and teach the "newbies" a lot that the text books and labs cannot. There should be incentives for them to do this and incentives for the "newbies" to stay on learning from the "old hands" rather than running out to start money spinning "super clinics" where they don't even know the patients name. Just me venting, sorry folks.

1 comment:

supermom_in_ny said...

Hey! Sorry to here your little one is sick. I know how difficult it is to run a household and care for them, as well as tend to a sick little one.
I also know how it feels like to go through the evals. I did them four times, with three of my children. I hope that he receives the services that he needs. My little one receives a full day program, but that's because our system works differently in regards to special services. I read an article on residents of Canada, on how they have to pay for any special needs services their children need. That has to be a gargantuan feat for the families of kids like my Little One that receive all the services that are offered.
Anyway, I wish you all the best...