Brooke Qualifies for Speech Therapy

After the initial intake from the Orange County Regional Center (beginning of October), they determined Brooke needed a speech therapist come to the house for a formal evaluation of Brooke's speech. The speech therapist came (late October) and tested Brooke, and believes she would qualify for speech therapy. To qualify, a child under 2 years old needs to be at least 33% delayed (over 2 years old, a child needs to be 50% delayed). At 2 years old, a child should have a vocabulary of 50 words and proactively tries to repeat new words. Brooke has maybe - at best - 10 words and does not proactively try new words. (Interestingly enough, Jack was this same age and had about the same level of words/speech capability when he started his speech therapy.)

At the end of October, we received a call that Brooke does qualify for speech therapy and that they need to send someone out to do paperwork. That person came out the first week of November; she provided additional paperwork, releases, forms, etc. We learned Brooke is over 33% delayed - hence her qualification - but they didn't give us an exact percentage of delay because since they determined it was over 33%, they don't look at how much further (nice, eh?). She did say that based on what she has seen with Brooke, it is just a delay and not anything else (neurological, physical, etc. to cause a speech issue); and more importantly, that she should catch up with speech therapy. Brooke qualifies for 6 months of speech therapy. After 6 months, she'll be reevaluated and at that time, if she is over 50% delayed, she'll still qualify for speech therapy but if she is less than 50% delayed, she won't qualify for any more speech therapy (through the Orange County Regional Center) since she'll be over 2 years old at that time.

The Orange County Regional Center has assigned us to a different speech therapy center than where Jack went to, but this one is near Jack's preschool so that works out. Starting Tuesday, 11/17, Brooke will attend individual 1 hour speech therapy sessions (1 day a week). Scott will drop her off at 8am, then drop Jack off at preschool 10 minutes later, then circle back to pick Brooke up at 9am... and then back to preschool to pick Jack up at 11:30am.