The world of paperwork with Special Needs children is a bit daunting.
Okay, a lot daunting. Doctors and Therapists want to know exactly when your child reached each developmental milestone. For someone like me who had no desire to know about my own developmental milestones (read a baby book), I didn’t write down any of that for my children. I have a vague memory that D started walking at 10 months and R was a bit closer to a year. D rolled over at day 1 and R at 7 days. These documents, however, want to know when they first took solid foods, crawled, smiled, spoke the first word, 2-word combo, simple sentences, walked, skipped, jumped… Basically, every single thing they’ve ever done. Sorry. Not sorry. Lots of blank spots on my forms.
These forms also bring home to us each time just how far behind our children are. This can be devastating. Recently, as pictured above, you can see that D got a rating of age 19+!!!!!!! You have no idea what that was like to see. I don’t get reports that read like that! I wanted to proclaim it from the rooftops, tell everyone.
You wonder as you fill out these forms, should I mark yes because he does walk, but he falls down all the time; or, he does talk, but you can’t understand what he is trying to say? You second guess yourself all the way through. We fill out these forms ALL THE TIME… Seriously. There is many a Sunday night you will find me filling them out while watching tv for an upcoming appointment later that week. The State of AK has a form called the Idita Form. One basic form for all doctors and therapists, you fill it out once and make copies for everyone. I urge that all States adopt this immediately.
Then there are the questions like “Has your child ever done x,y, or z in ways that seem strange or bizarre”. Seems perfectly reasonable right? Our reality is that things that are strange and bizarre aren’t strange and bizarre anymore because strange and bizarre has become our life. So much so, that we feel a paralyzing indecision on answering these questions. We cannot always determine if things are strange and bizarre anymore. And our children’s very lives can depend on the information these doctors receive. This is important stuff!
AND THEN…
You spend all this time second-guessing yourself and trying to give them every detail you can remember….. And the doctor never even looks at it…
Welcome to the life of a Special Needs Parent
