That is what Little Bug calls the moon and Christmas lights. He has been going to the door every night the week signing MOON and WALK and then yelling MOO! He loves night walks. We bust out the mittens, hats and scarves, grab the flashlight and take the dog. We have a mission- to find different Christmas light displays every night. We wander around the neighborhood and look at the lights. Little Bug tells me the colors- some in sign and some in word approximations- and I am happy to just listen. I relish this time and the words he has and I am incredibly thankful for them.
Although he can't tell us much, what he can say is fascinating to me because of the logic behind it. For example, he uses MOON and WALK even though he knows night. He signs SPIDER and says BAA-AAA! If we tell him it is time to be quiet and go to sleep, he stops talking; instead he simply signs away in subversive protest. His logic astounds me and makes me crave knowing more.
On a much different topic, Little Bug will run out of therapy coverage by insurance after 4 months as our policy, which does include a neuro-developmental clause, only allows for 36 specialty appointments. Nick and I have thought of many options, some include asking for an Independent Medical Review, get training from his current therapists in order to do it ourselves, and not seriously but as a desperate idea- moving. That last thought made me want to know if there was a way of knowing what you are getting into in terms of ASD care before moving. I provided the legislative link yesterday and today i wanted to provide another. It is the Easter Seals Autism State Profile page-
http://www.easterseals.com/site/PageServer?pagename=ntlc8_autism_state_profiles
Hopefully, if you really are going to move, this will help you.
1 comment:
About the only thing going for us insurance-wise is that it resets on January 1 and we get our visit allotment back. Ours gets divided up so we get 30 speech and 30 OT with a 10% copay (after the $2,300 deductible...) so it could be much worse.
Isn't EI picking up at least some of the tab for you all? Here they do on a sliding scale, plus they negotiated lower fees with the therapists. So if we had to go out of pocket, a session would have been about $40 I think after all those adjustments. Not great, but it could have been worse.
Sometimes you can get a speech condition coded on the claim the therapist files that will circumvent some restrictions. If something is "medically necessary" some insurers cover it without a visit limit, but it's often a bit of a hail mary pass.
Now that we're in the school system, he gets all of his speech and OT at school, in class and with a therapist once a week. Of course, when school is out, we get nada from them. Still, this has been pure salvation since our insurance visit allotment ran out four months ago.
Lesson there - fight like hell to get everything you can on his IEP when that rolls around. Start reading and researching now and go in armed and ready.
To make up for the lack of available visits, we learned everything we could, set up a home classroom, and pretty much do as much as we can from here when school is out. We might go back to his old therapists some during breaks if insurance cooperates after Jan 1.
It's not as ideal as having trained therapists, but you can learn to do a lot of this yourself.
I'm seriously entertaining the idea of trying to create a web site that will help parents learn how to do a lot of things on their own - not as a complete substitute for trained experts since it's not like we can go back and get a graduate degree in this, but for those of us who financially can't afford it and have to go it on our own.
The problem is, I have no idea how I'm going to carve out the time to do it without getting a lot of volunteers. Plus I'm too tired to ponder it tonight. :-)
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