Kid's Health Update

Elissa

On Monday Elissa had an appointment with her neurologist.

She is 1.5 years SEIZURE Free!

We are SO thankful for this blessing.

It was her regular 6 month checkup.

I was preparing for a bit of a battle with the Doctor. She is great and knowledgeable and highly recommended, but she is also very stubborn. My plan for Elissa is to have another EEG the beginning of the Summer and then ween off the medicine all Summer long so she can start 2nd Grade without medicine.

It was such a blessing that she went right along with my plan. :-)

She said that it sounded like a great idea and we'll do the EEG in June.

If the abnormality is gone, then we will wean her off this Summer. If the abnormality is still showing then she will have to stay on medicine and we will do another EEG in a year.

The EEG will not be that fun. Elissa has to be sleep deprived. We have to keep her up till midnight and then wake her up at 4am and keep her awake until we get to the sleep study center in Puyallup. Then while she is sleep deprived she has to tolerate them putting A LOT of electrodes on her head, which takes about 20 minutes or so. Then the test is one and a half hours long. It will be interesting.

Her blood work came back normal and she is doing great!

Please be in prayer that the abnormality is gone!

 Zach

If you have been around Zach at all, you know that he is a bit hard to understand at times. Soon after he started preschool his teacher suggested that he be evaluated by a speech therapist. Thankfully Dieringer School District has two speech therapists on staff and even though Zach is not in grade school yet, he still has the opportunity to get help from them. His preschool meets in the elementary school, so they work closely with the school.

It took awhile, but Zach was evaluated just before Winter break. He ended up not having very many sound issues, so he didn't "technically" qualify for the program. But the issues he did have were atypical and the speech therapist was able to make a case that intervention needed to start now to correct the issues.

We decided to have him tested at Mary Bridge also to make sure that we were doing everything that we needed to work on his speech issues. We met with the speech therapist there today. She confirmed that he does have atypical issues. He doesn't make the sound for "F" and he can't make the sound for "S" or "Sh", which of course is one of the hardest issues to correct. She said that doing the speech therapy through the school district and working with him at home is the way to go. The only other recommendation she had was to have his hearing tested again. He hasn't had a test since before his tubes went in. This is just to rule out that there are no hearing issues affecting his speech.

Why does he have these issues? Well, it would have to be due to his chronic ear infections. He started with a severe double ear infection at 9 months and he had an ear infection from that point on every 6-8 weeks until tubes were put in just before he was 2 years old. The poor little guy never heard words clearly. When he started speaking, he would kind of hum or mumble under his breath. After his tubes were put in he started speaking clearer and clearer. Now he just needs help relearning what he wasn't able to hear when he started speaking.

I have to say, it has not stopped him from talking at all. I think he talks more then Elissa ever did at this age and she talked A LOT.

Thank goodness we have no idea how hard parenting will be before we have kids. LOL!