One Evaluation After Another

The evaluation at Child Development Watch took a couple of hours. It was clear with Jeremy's tears, inability to focus or respond appropriately to portions of the evaluation that things were not going well. At the end of the evaluation, the neurologist sat us down and carefully explained that based on what they were able get from Jeremy, he was demonstrating signs of autism. Since he was only 22 months, I believe we were told that they could not give a solid medical diagnosis of autism until he was older. This was enough to get him involved in early intervention services:speech, physical and occupational therapies. In less than 1 month the speech and occupational therapists were coming to our home for 30 minute sessions. We decided to take him to another location for the physical therapy session. I am not sure if there was much progress in the first few months because he cried so much during the sessions. The therapists were great. The speech therapist created 'pecs' or pictures of common items that he would need to request. She also started teaching him a few signs for 'juice' and 'more'. At that time he never showed much interest in using her tools. The Occupational therapist was great too. She had a cart full of the most interesting toys. Noah loved playing with them, but Jeremy just wanted her to go. A decision was made at some point to transfer Jeremy's therapy sessions to Easter Seals where the setting was more like that of a pre-school. There was hope that being around other children would help Jeremy feel more comfortable. It was a very nice environment and we met lots of families with children with a variety of special needs. After several month at Easter Seals he did finally begin to calm down and not cry as much. Now that he was approaching age 3 the discussions began about transitioning Jeremy into the school system. This meant he needed to be evaluated by a host of school specialists. I filled out a questionnaire in February 2006. That was followed by both school and home observations in March of 2006. The summary and recommendations were, "the pattern of behaviors noted in the present assessment is clearly consistent with the educational classification of autism.. it is recommended that Jeremy attend a program that is highly specialized in the use of established best practices for students with autism." We decided to go ahead and enroll him in the summer program. This would allow him to ease into a school routine before the school year actually began. We were blessed to move to Delaware at that time because the Autism program here was well known around the country. He had classmates early on whose families relocated just to be part of this program. In 2006 few states had public school programs that could accommodate that broad range of needs of students on the autism spectrum. As awareness about autism spectrum disorder has been raised, more of the needed services are being made available to families at no or minimal costs. The road has been long and difficult, but the Budd Family has come a long way by God's grace. Our boys are now nine and ten years old and are doing great! They are each learning at their own pace and happy.