ECI intake and Pedi visit

This time last year, it was pretty normal for Brooklyn to have tons of appointments, but our calendar doesn't usually look like this anymore! Anyway, I have a lot to catch y'all up on. This past week, Brooklyn had her Early Childhood Intervention (ECI) intake appointment, an appointment with Dr. A, and her evaluation with the developmental specialist and speech therapist from ECI (I'm going to do a separate post on the ECI evaluation.) And tomorrow she sees her pulmonologist, Dr. G2.

Wednesday, 9/9 - ECI intake.
It took about six weeks to get this appointment for Brooklyn. I did a self-referral on the advice of a friend who is a nurse back when Brooklyn was not speaking at all.

The developmental coordinator came to our house Wednesday. She had told me over the phone that the intake would take about 20 minutes and that we were going to go over my pregnancy, Brooklyn's birth, her medical history, and her development. I thought it was really funny that the lady thought it would only take 20 minutes to go over all of Brooklyn's medical history...and I was right, she was there for over an hour.

Brooklyn warmed up to her immediately and really seemed to like her. She didn't determine Brooklyn's eligibility for services or anything at that point, it was strictly an information-gathering type of appointment. She told us she would return with the speech therapist to evaluate Brooklyn the following Monday. She also took note of Brooklyn's head tilt and said that she would talk to their physical therapist about the possiblity of coming to evaluate Brooklyn at the same time as well.

One thing that I think is really great about ECI is that they are going to come to our house for everything...so, no other kids, no waiting rooms, no germs, no sickies!!!

Friday, 9/11 - 18 month appointment with Dr. A, Brooklyn's pediatrician.
Brooklyn weighed 20 pounds, 10 ounces (5th percentile) and was 31 inches tall (almost 25th percentile). This showed up as a weight loss of almost a pound since last month. But I told Dr. A that there had been a different nurse there at our last appointment, and she had Brooklyn stand on the older kids' scale fully clothed, instead of laying her on the baby scale in her diaper like they normally do. Dr. A said that the substitute nurse should have listened to me when I tried to tell her about how they normally weigh Brooklyn, so he marked last month's weight as "falsely elevated."

Dr. A said that Brooklyn's weight gain is not great, as usual, but it is "adequate." We will keep her on 2 bottles of increased calorie formula per day for now to help her gain weight.

He was very happy, as of course we are, that Brooklyn is starting to say some words again. She has about eight words she says now (baby, bear, bink, bib, ball, yeah, this, eye, dada...oh, UPDATE...this weekend marked the return of MAMA!!!!) He was very encouraged that she is making progress again, and said, "I don't know what happened to make her regress like that. To be honest, we'll probably never know what happened." According to his standards, Brooklyn is almost back in the range of normal speech for her age.

We told Dr. A about the ECI evaluation that we had scheduled. He really doesn't think that speech therapy is all that helpful in children younger than two, but definitely doesn't feel like it hurts. He thinks that ECI will be able to help Brooklyn more with her head tilt than with anything else. He does think she needs some physical therapy for it at this point. He said that she can correct it for short periods of time, she just usually doesn't. Another thing that he said we will have to keep an eye on is that babies with head tilts can have vision problems - sometimes one of their eyes will not focus as well as the other eye because they don't look at things straight on. He said that around her second birthday, he will refer her to a pediatric optometrist to make sure everything is okay with her eyes, but right now, he doesn't see any signs of problems there.

Brooklyn had to get her Hib vaccine and her flu shot. I asked whether she would be getting Synagis shots again this fall and Dr. A said that he would call Dr. G2 to discuss it with him. He doesn't feel like RSV would be as detrimental to Brooklyn's health this season as it would have been last year, even though she has not outgrown her laryngomalacia. He is not sure how much our insurance would fight us over it either.

I guess we will find out more at Brooklyn's appointment with Dr. G2 tomorrow.