It is only a general diagnosis, but today we received Angelica’s evaluation from the speech therapist. Angelica has expressive and receptive language disorder. She is delayed. On the bell curve there are three categories of delay. Mild, moderate, and severe. She is moderately delayed. She is in about the 6th percentile for her age.

Angelica will begin speech therapy next Wednesday morning. I really hope it helps her. Last year speech therapy didn’t seem to make a lasting impact. At first it didn’t seem to help at all. Then it seems like it helped a little bit maybe. And then as soon as I had to pull her out of speech for our move, the progress was immediately lost. Overall I would say it just didn’t help her. But this speech therapist is hopefully going to do different things, and she’s going to be focusing on language rather than pronunciation, so hopefully we will see some results.

Angelica is very bright. She loves to talk to people and she loves it when I read her stories. She is actively engaged with everything around her and interested in so many things. Angelica is highly creative, compassionate, and communicative. But she just has a hard time with certain elements of communication. I have suspected that something was wrong for a while. Hence the fact I had her in speech therapy for a year back in Virginia. This confirms what I had feared. But hopefully she will get a lot of help from the speech therapist and maybe she can make great strides this year.

We also have appointments set up with a developmental pediatrician for an evaluation, and we are being referred to an OT.

Officially having it in writing that she is delayed and by how much has giving me mixed feelings. It confirms my fears, which gives me a sinking feeling. At the same time now maybe we can get people to help her and we will see some improvements. But her diagnosis is really a general diagnosis and not specific. The problem with that is that when we look up how to teach her to read or how to teach her to do math we don’t know what to put in the search engines to tell us how to teach her. If she has auditory processing disorder teaching is difficult but there are some things you can do to help. For a variety of other delays and disorders there are different things you can do to teach your child and improve their odds at a positive outcome. But without knowing what specifically it is it’s very hard to determine what to do. Hopefully the developmental pediatrician will be able to shed some light on that issue and give us a direction to go in. Homeschooling is not going well. It’s still early so I’m holding out hope, but she is definitely having a hard time and not catching on. Language arts is her strong suit, but even there she is not doing as well as I had hoped. And math is an absolute no-go.

For the next couple of months we’re going to keep pushing through as we are and reviewing the lessons in our curriculum. I’m going to do my best to teach her and encourage her to keep trying even though it is difficult. The receptive language issue is really holding her back. In a couple of months if we see no progress, we will likely hire a tutor when we get back from vacation. And hopefully by then too we will have the evaluation results from the developmental pediatrician and we’ll have more to go on in figuring out how to help Angelica. So we can maybe get a tutor who can help her and we may have some new tools in our toolbox to help her ourselves as well.