So, I haven't updated in a long while. That's getting to be a habit of mine. We've been pretty busy in the five months since my last update, but let's see how much I can recount of that time.
So we finally did get in contact with a Speech Language Pathologist, who was running a home practice as well as working out of an office. She gave us a few tips and tricks to try but ultimately said that we might see better results going with an Occupational Therapist. An OT, at least for small children, focuses on play since that is the bulk of what a toddler will be doing. Normally, children develop through their play, and it was the SLP's thought that Fox wasn't really ready for Speech therapy. She also worried that he had developmental problems that was hampering his growth. In any case, she was closing down her home practice and hadn't decided whether or not she would keep Fox on as a client. So we stopped seeing her in August.
On August 2oth, we brought Fox in to see a pediatrician, who diagnosed him with autism. He scheduled a CT scan and some blood work, and we have the follow up appointment in the next couple of weeks. Kidsability was informed, and Fox was taken off the wait list for speech, and put on the wait list for Autism.
The blood work didn't turn up anything untoward, but the CT scan showed that his brain was "underdeveloped" (not sure precisely what that means, hopefully in the follow up we'll clear all that up).
Now, the prevailing treatment for autsim is Intensive Behavioural Intervention, or IBI, which is based off the principles of Applied Behavioural Analysis, ABA. As I understand it, it is based on modifying behaviour through positive reinforcement. The government provides IBI treatment to autistic children in our region through Erinoak. Unfortunately, the waitlist is 2 to 3 years :(. We had our intake meeting with the folks from Erinoak on November 6th, and we get the strong feeling that Fox won't qualify as having a severe enough form of Autism Spectrum Disorder and thus won't get access to it. However it's still up in the air and would be two to three years out in any case. In the meantime, we're paying out of pocket for IBI-therapists to see Fox 3 times a week for 2 hours at a time.
We also had an OT do several sessions with Fox and she had a few suggestions as well. She also pointed us to the direction of Relationship Development Intervention, or RDI. So we met with the local consultant and are interested in that as well. I ended up going to a conference which featured the developer of RDI, Dr. Steve Gutstein, and it looks promising.
Now with the bad news out of the way, there's also some good news: on the spectrum of Autism, it seems Fox will have a very mild form (what they call a "High functioning" autistic). While it means we get hammered in the bank account more (since the government only pays for therapy for more severe forms), it's a good starting place and hopefully means the treatments will be more effective. We've also caught it pretty early, earlier than most (a lot of the stories I hear are kids getting diagnosed around 4. That saves us two years on the waiting list :). The IBI therapy that he's been doing for the last three months or so, while it hasn't got him any more vocal, he did finally master a few signs (open, more, all done) and he's good with a shape sorter.
On November 7th, Fox's sister Ruby was born, and while he at first didn't want to have anything to do with her at all, he's at least touched her and tried interacting with her.
So in all, there's still a long way to go there, but it's progress.
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