Mama moments...

 About a year ago I was sitting on my living room floor with two wonderful ladies from a program called Help Me Grow.  I don't remember how exactly we got hooked up with them but it was at a time we were baffled by our youngest Amelia.  Around six months she stopped sitting.  I mean the girl who could previously sit would not longer sit in a high chair, on the floor, on your lap...it seemed to cause her extreme pain. She also started struggling with eating and sleeping and it was obvious she was regressing.  We saw our primary doctor who sent us for x-rays and refereed us to a Pediatric Orthopedic Surgeon.  We worked with a chiropractor and a homeopath and somehow along the way I ended up with a case worker and a physical therapist in my living room.

They did a thorough evaluation of Amelia but the funny thing was as quickly as she "lost" everything, it came back.  They determined that she did not qualify for their program where a physical therapist would have come to our house and worked with Amelia.  As they sat there that day explaining everything to me they asked if I had any questions.  Amelia really did appear to be "back to normal" but I did have questions.  I decided to express my concerns about Lorelei and see what they thought.  See Lorelei was almost 2 and she was smart and a great communicator, she just didn't use many words.  They determined that Lorelei should be evaluated for speech therapy and low and behold she did qualify. They called it an "immature mouth" where she didn't know how to physically move her mouth and tongue to form the sounds she needed.  At the beginning of the school year a speech therapist started coming to our house once a week to work with Lorelei and we noticed improvement almost immediately.

Today I sat on my living room floor with two wonderful ladies from a program called Help Me Grow. Lorelei will be turning 3 in a few weeks and it was time to have her reevaluated to see if she continued to qualify for speech therapy services.  They compared the two evaluations and showed how one year ago Lorelei had 12-15 words she used and could be understood, now she uses sentences with up to six words.  In fact her scores are now above average. She's doing very well and no, she no longer qualifies for speech therapy.

Watching her speech develop at such a quick rate has been incredible, but seeing her come out of her shell and the confidence she has gained has been amazing.  So today I am just in awe of our Lorelei and I'm so thankful that God has entrusted us in raising her. We think she's pretty incredible.

Thank you, Lord, for turning my hard mama moments into proud mama moments.