On the recommendation of a friend who is a behavior analyst (who kindly spent many hours in our home observing Bree), we enrolled Bree in our local public preschool. I contacted Child Find to see if they could re-evaluate her to see if she still qualified for any services, and she did qualify. (They had evaluated her at age 2.5, too, which is when we were able to get free in-home speech therapy but we’d decided to wait on preschool at that time due to her young age.)
Best First Day of School Picture Ever
(NOTE: She isn’t mad about having to go to preschool. She just was having a rough morning all around. The Reimers aren’t known to be morning people!)
Enrolling Bree in preschool was a tough decision but after only a couple of weeks of preschool, I am greatly encouraged and feel like it was the right one for Bree. She is loving it. Her teacher has been so sweet and is wonderful about telling me how Bree’s day went. Â This particular school has a lot of special needs kids and they do most of the therapies in the classroom. Bree will be getting speech therapy and will also work with therapists to help behaviorally and socially.
Bree has already made a little friend there. Her name is Cecilia. (Bree calls her Ceciwia.) Bree is learning how to cut on the line with scissors and is proud of it.
Feeling better now that she is playing with a puzzle at school.
We finally made it off of the wait list for Occupational Therapy for her Sensory Processing Disorder at Children’s Hospital. We’ve had a few sessions there now and they have been so helpful, both for Bree but also for me! We are working on a lot of role-playing these days; talking with Bree over proper responses to frustrations or sensory input that disturbs her. Also encouraging her to look at our eyes when speaking to us. I am proud of how well Bree has been cooperating with her occupational therapist, Miss Becky.
We are STILL on the wait list for the full developmental evaluation, however. We’ve been waiting for NINE months. I called, again, to find out when we would be seen. We *could* maybe get a call late this year to schedule an appointment for sometime early NEXT year. Crazy. I am so very frustrated by the wait. If early intervention is so important, then it sure would be nice if we could get in! I finally decided to pursue an evaluation at another hospital in Boulder. After scanning in what felt like hundreds of pages of IEPs and other evals (for SPD, etc.), I sent it over to them and they called me back within a week. We have an initial appointment (just a parent consultation) next week and if they feel, after talking to us, that Bree needs a full evaluation they will get that on the schedule. Hopefully in a month or two. Definitely sooner than Children’s Hospital.
Our hippotherapy in Longmont is done. We could have continued into the fall but I decided to look for a place closer to home, especially since our calendar is so busy already and an hour drive (each way) just won’t fit in any longer. I did find a therapeutic horse riding stable. It isn’t hippotherapy, in that they don’t do speech therapy along with the horse riding. But they do most everything else that Bree was doing at hippotherapy, like riding sideways, backwards, doing some games to encourage movement, etc. And Bree never cooperated for the speech portion of hippotherapy anyway. And therapeutic riding is a little cheaper. In additional to therapeutic riding, they also offer regular riding lessons so we are going to enroll Adrianna in those.
Bree is still involved in gymnastics once a week. We consider this her physical therapy right now and she really enjoys it and the instructors are really good and patient with Bree. The owner of the gym has a daughter with Sensory Processing Disorder so they have been extra good about how to work with Bree. I love our gym.
Getting a haircut
On Sunday, August 24th, Greg was flying a new toy around the house and the older girls were running around like crazy people. Adrianna slipped on the hardwood floor in the kitchen and fell. Not even a minute later, Bree slipped, too! And we were horrified to see a tooth on the floor. A whole tooth; root and all! And a beautiful, top, front tooth. Bree and knocked it clean out.
It was pretty traumatic for all of us. Bree wouldn’t let us look in her mouth to assess the damage. She hardly spoke for almost 24 hours. I called our dentist (after hours) and they made an appointment for the very next morning for us. Amazingly, Bree did let her look at her mouth and her other teeth and the break (if you can call it that since the entire tooth came out in one piece) was very clean. No fragments left behind, no stitches needed. All other teeth are fine. Bree did absolutely refuse any X-rays though. Not even ice cream could sway her.
Bree still loves My Little Ponies, horses, and sea horses. She adores playing “Pollies and Ponies” with Adrianna and asks to play that with Adrianna every single day. Bree loves to read books with me and she enjoys doing puzzles and playing with her pattern blocks. She is very imaginative and can play on her own for hours. She amazes me sometimes with the things she makes out of Legos or her pattern blocks. She also has an innate musical talent, with an ear for tunes, which she picks up quickly. I am so glad she is giving hugs more readily now, as I cannot get enough little snuggles with my sweet Breezy girl.