"I fall down."

Claire just said her first 3-word sentence in over a year!!! Hurray!!!


(And in other news, we found the camera battery, so stay tuned for a couple months' worth of pictures. Hopefully I can get them up in the next day or so.)

ECI Update

We had our second visit with ECI today. A speech-language pathologist came out this time to do a separate assessment on Claire. Her receptive language scored 21-24 months and her expressive language scored 15-18 months. So because of the 7-month delay in expressive, we will start receiving services. Mike (our case manager and child development specialist) agreed with me about all the progress Claire's made in the last month, and he believes she'll be talking in no time. He'll start coming out to the house to work with her in December, then we'll transfer services to San Antonio in January.

The Run

Jason, Lauren and I ran the San Antonio Half Marathon yesterday morning. We all did a great job, with Jason's finishing time a personal best, and Lauren and me proud of just simply finishing! For more details, click here for a recap on Lauren's blog. Happy running!

Bragging

Claire has made HUGE improvements with her communication lately!! Here are a few examples:

1. She can write! After I write her name on a piece of paper, Claire takes the crayon and "writes" her name. She'll even say letters as she makes the marks. Her letters now are just vertical lines, but she already knows that they go in a certain order and from left to right! This is more advanced than a bunch of my 4-year olds!

2. She can tell me the names and make the sounds of just about every letter in the alphabet!

3. She counted all the way to 7 today! Marie took her to the park, and she used her finger to point to pieces of mulch and count them one by one. I've only heard her go to 3 before, so this is big jump.

Yay Claire!

A change

There has been a lot going on over at our house lately. I have lots of pictures I need to post, too, but the camera battery is dead and I can't find the charger, so I can't get the pictures off of it. The biggest news requires no pictures, though, other than maybe this one:


And this one:

Yep, we're moving. Jason has been offered an amazing job working for a company that contracts with the Department of Defense. He'll be training the military personnel who respond first to acts of terrorism, specifically nuclear, anywhere in the world. He's finally going to be using his degree AND getting out from behind a desk! His last day at his current company is tomorrow, then he'll move to his parents' house in San Antonio on Sunday, and start at the new job on Monday. Claire and I will stay behind so that I can finish out the month at school and work on getting the house on the market. We'll head to San Antonio in December part-time, then move "for real" over Christmas. We're (obviously) hoping our house sells fast, but we're (more realistically) preparing to have a bit of a wait. I have a feeling it's going to be a crazy couple of months.....

ECI

We had our first meeting with ECI this afternoon. Our case manager, Mike, came out to the house to just do an initial "get to know you"-type of evaluation. He and I spent most of the time talking about Claire's history and the process we'll follow if she qualifies for services. He'll come back out on Nov 18 with a speech-language pathologist who will do a more thorough assessment and together they'll determine what sorts of interventions and/or therapies Claire may need. Mike is an autism specialist, and he was sent to us because of Claire's speech regression. He said that he's never seen a regression as profound as Claire's is that wasn't autism. BUT, after doing an autism evaluation today with her, he's positive that's not the problem here. (OK everyone, sigh of relief) When I asked him what he thought could be going on, he said his first thought was that there could be a problem with the speech part of her brain. (And how we'd determine that or even fix it is beyond me, and, of course, I wasn't thinking about any of those follow-up questions at the time.) At the end of our meeting he told me that based on what he had seen today, he's fairly confident that she will qualify for services, but we'll have to wait for the next assessment to determine what exactly that will look like.

3 Nights

That's how long Jason and I will be gone from Claire starting tomorrow. It's the longest amount of time both of us together have been away from her, so I should expect myself to be full of worries. But, I'm not. Instead, I absolutely positively CANNOT wait for tomorrow. We're heading out to Napa for a fantastic weekend with each other and some great friends. Katie (my best friend from the first day of kindergarten, as well as my Mexican-adventure companion--you can click here and here for that story) is getting married to a great guy on Friday. We're leaving home tomorrow morning, which should put us at the first winery around 2 PM local time. Friday will be full of wedding fun, but Saturday is ours to play with! We've got lots of reservations at some of the best wineries out there, and we'll finish the weekend off with an extra-special dinner for two. The only down side to all of this is that our plane leaves at midnight Saturday night (or would that be Sunday morning?) and lands in Houston at 5:30 AM. Yuck, yuck, yuck. But, it's a small price to pay for all the fun we're about to have. And I'm sure Claire is going to have quite a few stories to tell us when we get back--Honey and H have all sorts of adventures planned to keep her busy.