Many of you may remember that my four year old son has been found to have a speech delay. After the initial shock and sense of parental failure wore off, we decided to start speech therapy. Seems easy enough, right? Wrong! He was supposed to receive his speech therapy at the base elementary school (based on our address and the same school that his sister goes to), because the school system must provide services to a child found eligible. Well after no one from the school contacted me to set up a schedule (like I was told someone would), I contacted the school myself only to be told WE don't have a speech therapist, they are not a dime a dozen.
Okay, Wow, so what do I do now? Well the school was "nice enough" to send me a list of Speech Language Pathologists that are interested in private contracting and would be paid by the school system even though the services would be provided after school hours. This list had about 25 names on it. So I figured this won't be so hard there are plenty of names on this list. Well it turns out that there are A LOT of students in need of Speech Therapy and not nearly enough Speech Language Pathologists to go around. This baffled me, HOW could there be that many children in need of this service? I did a little research and found that almost any child found to have a delay in any area and receiving services almost always starts with Speech Therapy, hence the shortage.
I went through the list with meticulous precision, this person could only do one session per week, this one could do two, this one could only do early morning, this one just did not seem to know what her schedule was, etc. My son was found eligible to receive three sessions per week for 30 minutes per session.
I am thrilled to report that we finally found a very nice lady that is willing to provide my son with his speech therapy three days per week in the afternoon (after school), at the school where she works! I think she felt sorry for us as my desperation surely came through in the voice mails that I left and the e-mails that I sent to her. He started on Monday and had a lot of fun with the session. He goes again today. I am very excited. After working so hard and getting so discouraged I finally was able to find someone willing to provide the service that the IEP called for. She seems very enthusiastic and confident that we can get him going in the right direction. She shares the same basic goal for him that my husband and I share, to get his speaking skills as sharp as possible before he starts Kindergarten in September of 2009. He will probably still have some issues, but we would like his delay to be hardly noticeable at that point. We really want him to be able to communicate with his teachers and other students with little difficulty.
--Contributed by Renee
Those of you who read Mommage regularly probably know that my husband and I have no children. Well, no human children, anyway. Around Thanksgiving of last year, though, we became the proud "parents" of an elderly Japanese Chin named Ming. I know all parents probably say this, but isn't he the cutest little guy you've ever seen? Anyway, when we brought Ming home a friend made a comment that made me view our domestic arrangement in a different light. "You know," she said as I cuddled and generally made much of our new family member, "this is more than a dog. This is a practice baby." 
