Well we had a great weekend. We met with J's play therapist Thursday morning who will be working with J's speech therapist once we actually retain one. Before getting into the whole search for a speech therapist i must say that our play therapist was excellent. After spending 45 minutes playing with J he had learned a new sign and was sounding out a few words with "h" in the beginning. He was so happy to have someone play with him and just focus on him for a change, that he was so sad when she had to leave. I felt like such a horrible parent though because it made me realize how little one on one time he has with me. I wish i could devote more time with him, like he had before D was born and sometimes i wonder if he is suffering in some way because of my inability to give him one on one attention. I feel like sometimes he craves my attention and i am just so caught up in housework, D, trying to get sleep, etc. that he gets left out. I do spend time with him as much as i am able.

It is a long tale in trying to obtain a speech therapist has been going on since J turned 2. Right now he is babbling more and more and starting to produce words, like "no", "moo", "wow", "thank you" (ok once but very clear), "cow". So my theory is that he is just a late talker. We are still going to get a speech therapist, but he ages out of the state's program at the age of 3 which is in June. At that point he would start the public school's program which is another round of paperwork and a new case worker so to speak. I wish that they weren't so short handed in this program and had gotten to him earlier. Now he is going to get comfortable with his play therapist and speech therapist and then in a few months that will end. Now since we have private insurance through our company, and because his birthday falls at the end of the school year we can elect to continue on our own until the public school systems plan started in September. The difference will be that the play therapist will no longer be free ( the state pays for 5 hours of play therapy a month) and the state will no long pay 40% of whatever our insurance does not pick up. So i don't know. I will try to make it happen if J is really progressing well and needs them over the summer, but financially we may not be able to pay for it. Therapists are not cheap. Now originally we chose the state program because everything could be done in our home, sessions, etc. Once we got through a month of testing and paperwork we come to find out that the speech therapist is not an in home thing. Which, hello, in the beginning this was the EXACT thing i stated to our case worker that attracted me to the program. Had i of know that i had to still take J somewhere, we could of started this back when he turned 2 and we had the evaluation at the place our pediatrician recommended. Needless to say i feel that my time had been wasted all of these months on a waiting list and that they completely ignored the major request had had for this program up front. This being said on the morning that the play therapist (we will call her C in future posts) met with us our case worker (we will call her M in future posts) stated that she had found a speech therapist that would come into our home for sessions. Oh happy day! The only problem is that her company in not an "in network" provider with my insurance company, therefore i am not sure that they will pay on it. Most of the time they pay X#% if the provider is out of network, but not for most of the specialty stuff. So i am researching this as i may just go with the speech therapist i have to drive to. It is only 1.5 miles from the house and they are on the provider's list. *sigh* someone to work with him in home is really such an attractive option though as D is not the most cooperative baby especially now that he has learned to crawl. M and I are trying to work on deciding by tuesday since we only found out about this on Thursday and Monday is a holiday.