We have Georgia's first IEP meeting a week from today. It seems like just days ago we were more or less ignoring the inevitability of that future meeting and now it is only days away. I am not too very nervous about it. Alex and I are fairly level-headed and I am pretty sure I know what is going to be said. Granted, I am keeping open to the possibility of being thrown a for a loop if something other than what I think is going to happen happens, but we'll just wait and see I guess.
Leading up to this meeting there have been lots of other meetings. Evaluations and tests, people asking Georgia to put pennies in piggy banks and jump with two feet off the ground. We are doing some age equivalency testing so that we have a "baseline" to compare Georgia as she grows up, but there is a large part of me who simply does not give these tests any weight whatsoever. The psychologist doing the testing has been great, she honestly seems to want to give Georgia the benefit of the doubt when she is able and she has put in a lot of effort and energy into testing her as fairly as possible.
Despite the tests not holding a ton of weight with me, it still hits you when they start applying numbers to your child. Especially when those numbers symbolize how many months behind she is in relation to typically developing children. It's not that I am completely surprised by these numbers, seeing where our own Rainer is these days in relation to where Georgia was at that age--or is at this age in some cases--is eye-opening.
Since the testing techniques were explained to me I am not surprised to learn that Georgia tests highest in cognitive/emotional, expressive/receptive language. But before the testing was explained, I thought for sure G would test highest in gross motor.. I know that Georgia "gets" it--much of the time--but, I guess because Georgia has been walking for a year now I sort of assumed that she was strongest with gross motor, followed by fine motor, and than speech and language. She is exactly the opposite though...fine motor is the constant in that equation.
I won't list numbers here because I get an unsavory feeling when I imagine people comparing my child to their own, but they seem, in my opinion, to fall squarely in the mid-range if that makes any sense. I asked the psychologist if there is any way to figure out where Georgia lies in terms of people with DS (because look, I'll admit, I am curious), but the only standardization that the testing takes into consideration is vs. typical children. It makes sense, they have to quantify somehow, but I do wonder. I think it is a valid question. Where does she fall? Or, rather, what are her strengths, on the DS spectrum?
All of this means very little in the overall scheme of things though. It doesn't necessarily pre-determine the rest of her childhood or life, it doesn't mean that her biggest weakness will always be gross motor or that her strength will always be cognition. I've always believed that there are so many "kinds" of intelligence--artistic, athletic, musicality, emotional, etc....--and I already know that Georgia is a bright girl with her own way of doing things. She doesn't always do things the "right" way, but she usually figures out "her" way and not to put to broad a brush to it, if you invent your own way in this world, that's kind of ingenious.
And so we chug along. Here is an interesting article.
