I just turned around..and evaluation followup

and it is five weeks until Dash's First Birthday.
I'm amazed every day this week by how different he is than even a month ago, but especially two to three months ago.

We had Dash's evaluation on the 14th and the eligibility meeting on the 18th. He received evaluation in the following areas:

cognition (how well he learns, thinks, etc)

adaptive behavior (how he takes care of himself)

gross (crawling, etc) and fine (grasping with hands, etc) motor

educational (learning) skills

speech and language

His scores in EVERY area - except for PT- were within the range of average. Our Family Resource Counselor, who met Dash about six weeks ago, couldn't believe he was the same baby.

His language skills were great, his social skills were good, his cognitive skills were great. All looked good.

But his PT showed about a two to three month delay. He actually qualified for services; even though he'd been crawling about a week. He qualified for services in locomotion, how he gets around, and the OT wanted to work on his cruising, pulling up, etc.

We decided that because he'd made so much progress in the last six weeks that we would do at home stuff for the physical therapy and have her revisit at our home in the fall to see where she thought he was.

We also saw an allergist that day and we got to talking about his hernia surgery and recovery. The allergist said that the surgery is actually fairly involved and that they have to make a new abdominal floor with his fascia and muscles and that that takes a long time to heal, about 8 weeks. The day we had the evaluations and the allergist appointment, was 8 weeks to the day of his surgery.

I do have some very minor concerns but I think he's made such great progress that I expect to see them disappear. My only concern at this point is that he doesn't respond to his name 100% of the time. But he is getting better and better every day.

Here's what I've learned through this all: be an advocate for your child. I was really tired of going to doctors and telling them that something was wrong and having them think I was nuts. But something was wrong. He was likely in pain for a good nine months of his life. I'm proud that I pushed so far, but I'm also really thrilled that his skills are so smack on average.