About Nate.

January 25, 2006 in Uncategorized

A few people have asked what Nate’s special needs are. He has Sensory Integration Dysfunction. The link will explain it a whole lot better than I can, it’s long, but you don’t have to read the whole thing. I’ll wait til you come back, and then I’ll talk about how it relates to Nate.

OK, you’re back? Cool.

I first noticed that there was something “wrong” with Nate when he was about 15 months old, or so. Everyone else’s kids were developing way faster than Nate was, they were hitting milestones, whereas Nate was not. For several months I tried to tell everyone I knew that Nate’s development was not normal, but everyone told me that he would catch up, and I had several people actually tell me, “Don’t you know kids develop at different rates?”

No. I’m an idiot. I had no idea.

Hahaha, I can laugh about this now. I couldn’t laugh about this back when it was happening. I was very hurt and angry that people that have known me a long time would think that I had no idea that kids developed at different rates, or that I was the panicky sort. Finally, when he was 18 months, I KNEW there was something going on with Nate, and I took him to the doctor, who gave me the same routine about kids all developing differently, and that Nate would be fine.

Long story short, I found Tennessee Early Intervention. (That’s the website for the Memphis district, the Middle Tennessee district doesn’t seem to have a website. It’s the same thing, just different district.) They came out, tested Nate, and he had some pretty serious delays. The worst were in speech development and social development, but he was delayed in every single area they tested him in.

So, he got occupational therapy to help him learn to cope with the world (Nate is light defensive and oral defensive, and some other things) and speech therapy to teach him to communicate with us, and finally, he’s going to go to preschool to help with the social development.

So today was his first day. I dropped him off, then parked and went back in to watch from the booth where you can see them, but they can’t see you. Megs came with me. I wish I could say he was fine, and didn’t cry, but he cried. For me, even, which is something I thought I would never see, because he loves his daddy so much but doesn’t seem to be all that impressed with me.

The funny part:

There’s the sweetest little girl in there that is missing the bottom part of her leg, just past the knee. At some point I noticed this because her false leg was randomly sitting on one of the tables. Megs noticed it, “Look, mama, a leg is on the table.”

I said, “Yes, they must have had to take that little girl’s leg off.”

Megs: “They know how to take legs off here. Man, Nate had better start behaving, or they’ll take his leg off next.”

Baaahahahahahaaaaaa!

I did explain to her how sometimes, people aren’t born with all their body parts, or they lose them in accidents. But I still think Megs somehow thinks they’re going to take Nate’s leg off if he doesn’t behave himself.