Initial Home Visit

On Wednesday, we had our first in-home visit with TEIS.  This was just a preliminary evaluation before a full evaluation that will occur in the next 45 days.  I went into the meeting kind of excited, but somewhere around the middle and I started to feel sad (maybe I can blame it on the pregnancy hormones!).   Knowing that my child was being "tested" hit me somewhere in the middle of the evaluation and I was having a hard time with it (also knowing that my work email was blowing up when I took two measly hours off of work didn't help matters!!).  The lady who came to visit was super nice and Chase loved having someone new in the house to show out for.  He couldn't wait to dig into her bag and see all the toys and activities she had for him to play with.

The purpose of her visit was to gather a preliminary assessment as to whether Chase passed or needed a referral on certain abilities: motor skills, communication, cognitive, social, and adaptive.  Her assessment will then be passed on to another person who will come to the house and do a full evaluation to determine if Chase qualifies for further help.

They started out playing a game where she gave Chase two cups and some blocks.  She asked Chase to put the blocks in the cup.  Boom!  Done!  Before she even asked him to transfer the blocks to the other cup, he was already doing it.  Right before she went to take the cups and blocks away, he started transferring the blocks back to the other cup!  Such the show off!

She then brought out some stacking cups to see if Chase knew how to put them back together.  He kind of halfway did this, but he was more interested in putting the blocks from before in these new stacking cups! He then ignored any new instructions after he created his own new game!

Then she brought the cups and blocks back out again and put one block under one cup and shuffled the cups on the ground and asked Chase to find the block.  He immediately lifted both cups up at the exact same time.  She laughed and said he cheated and tried again.  He did the exact same thing again.  As you'll see later, she counted off for this in her assessment.

She then brought out a puzzle for Chase to try, let him color with her pen (which started a mini-tantrum when that part of the test was over!), and read a book.  She then asked Drew and I a bunch of questions about what he can and can't do, how he interacts with other kids, etc.

At the end, she showed us her initial assessment.  He passed on motor skills and social.  He got a refer on adaptive, communication, and cognitive.  She said he would have passed the cognitive except that he "cheated" on the cup game.  I think that's a little debatable!  I thought he was just being clever!!  The adaptive score came from us saying that he doesn't properly use a spoon - which is true.  He's very messy with a spoon when he's using it by himself.  I think that score was also counted off because he doesn't communicate to us when he wants food (or something like that...I honestly wasn't paying attention by this point when I saw all the "refers" on her page!).  The communication was a referral for obvious reasons as that was the whole reason why we got referred to TEIS in the first place.

So overall I'm glad that lady came over and I am looking forward to moving on and seeing what this new lady says next month.  I'm trying not to feel like a total failure for not giving Chase more opportunity to use a spoon (even though he uses one everyday!) or playing "cognitive" games with him.  I also hope we answered all the questions correctly because there is a whole 8+ hours everyday where we don't see Chase and the daycare teachers could have answered the questions differently than we did as they see him more (as I only see Chase 1 1/2 hours each day).  I hope I didn't shortchange his abilities when we answered the questions!