Aiden

I'm being taken down the "how much can you handle?" path lately. I know I haven't been great at giving things up to God much for the past few months, but is this really the way to get me to do it?

We had a parent-teacher conference at Aiden's school on Wednesday. All was going well and she said he was great, until we got to the "concerns" portion at the end. She is concerned about his communication style. It's a little more repetitive and less conversational than she'd like to see. Such as, if she were to ask him, "Do you like the green car or the blue car?", he would just repeat the question back to her and not give her an answer. Almost like he's unable to process the question. She suggested that we see an early intervention specialist who will do an evaluation here at our home and then make a recommendation as to whether to begin some sort of therapy (speech or otherwise) or to just let it go and assume he'll grow out of it.

I wasn't sure what to make of it all, so I called our pediatrician to find out his opinion. He suggested going ahead with the specialist. The scary part was hearing him say that it's the sort of thing they see in autistic children. He did mention that we know he's not really autistic because he's fine in all other areas of development, but it's just something to evaluate and see if there's anything to be really concerned about.

Even with his teacher AND his pediatrician saying he's absolutely fine in all other areas and NO, he is NOT mentally challenged in any way.....that it's probably just a little mental processing issue that can be resolved quickly, I'm still having a really hard time with this. This is my child that we're talking about. I don't want anything to be wrong, no matter how small. I know it's better to get it evaluated now, rather than wait and have him end up with processing issues later on. But I can't keep myself from wondering if I did something wrong. I don't want him to struggle with anything. I want it all to be perfect and for him to have the normal childhood scrapes and colds and nothing else. I'm struggling with this, big time. Even though we were told that up to 20% of children have to go into early intervention and there's nothing to get worried over, I'm still struggling. This isn't supposed to happen to Aiden.

If anyone has any experience with early intervention stuff, I'd appreciate hearing all about it. I plan on calling on Monday to set up the evaluation. I don't know how long it will take for it to actually take place, but I'll let you all know when it does and how it goes. Please keep us in prayer. I'm feeling overwhelmed with adjusting to 40 hour work weeks, my apparent inability to keep up with housework, the lack of employment opportunities for John, Nathan and his never-ending colds, and now Aiden's communication issue. Some days, I'd prefer to stay in bed.