Update

The Yelena dumpling is doing well, as snuggly and cute as ever. We've gotten more accustomed to her hazily diagnosed status and we have a better idea of what's going on. What I failed to explicitly mention is that all her delays are directly related to her issues with motor planning, which stem from whatever is wired differently in her brain. (I will snap at the next parent who tells me I'm lucky that she's not moving yet; yeah, she's really lucky she has to work her tushie off doing things that are involuntary for your kid.) Her motor planning issues explain the idiosyncratic nature of her skills (e.g. she can kiss different parts of our face on command but can't point them out on herself). Per the neurologist, worst case scenario her receptive language is only about 20% delayed, whereas the speech therapist she saw today doesn't think it's delayed -- it's difficult to determine because of her scattered expressive language skills. We can see her trying to move her mouth to form consonants but her inability to get some of them out is connected to the motor planning problems. The speech therapist was pretty confident that therapy would help, so we're looking forward to that starting.

Yesterday, she went in for an audiology evaluation, just to ensure hearing is intact. Although her infection is cleared up, she still has some fluid behind her eardrums and the audiologist didn't want to do the test because if there were any signs of reduced hearing it would probably be from the fluid and not actual loss. (The graph of the movement of her eardrum wasn't flat, but it wasn't all spiky; she estimated 40% fluidy.) The audiologist's opinion was that Yelena seemed to hear ok and that there was no reason to wait for speech therapy, she'll just do the test in a month when everything should be drained. Since neither her pediatrician nor neurologist noticed the bit of fluid (the audiologist said something snide about them not trained to look in ears properly) we might have our ENT friend take a peek-a-boo periodically in her ears.

Tomorrow we have an intake visit with Early Intervention. In the interim, we are scheduling ST and OT through Children's Memorial, where Yelena does her PT, since Lord of Bureaucracy only knows when EI will get everything in line. Even at Children's, they didn't have slots for evaluations until late January/February, but Evette pulled some strings and Yelena has her OT evaluation this week, as well. In other good news, Evette has EI certification, so Yelena can keep seeing her even when EI enters the picture. I think they would miss each other very much, since Evette tells Yelena that she could play with her all day and that her hour always goes by too quickly. Everyone loves my love bunny.