Katherine went in for a more thorough screening of her “artic and disfluency” problems this afternoon. Margie and I, meanwhile, waded through various forms that are designed to protect and delineate parental rights regarding various handicapped and disabled children — though the same paperwork applies to speech therapy for Kitten — but which oddly made us feel like we were signing her over to a government lab for research. (“Yes, Mr. and Mrs. Kent, we’ll take good care of your specime — I mean, your son, Clark.”)
One thing we did right, at least — I scanned the lengthy questionaire/profile we had to write up for her last night, so that if we ever have to do the same, we can use the same SWAGs for when she started using 2-3 word sentences, when she walked, etc.
The results of the more in-depth screening will be revealed in a couple of weeks at our next appointment. The immediate impression from the speech therapist was (stop me if you’ve heard this one) that she’s bright and has a lot to say. If we can just get her to be saying it clearly, she’ll have it made.
Amusingly enough, she even provided the speech therapist with an improvement to her screening method. She found, up on a toy shelf, a Fisher-Price tape player/karaoke mic. She insisted on taking this over to the screening table with her, and speaking into the microphone — which the therapist realized made it a lot easier for her to identify the sounds that Katherine is (mis)making. “I’ll have to start using that in all of our screenings,” she opined.
So far, I’m impressed by what they’ve been doing. We’ll see how it works out. We get a percentage of private speech therapy covered by Margie’s insurance, so we can also go private, if need be. We’ll see.