School

Anthony is up in the tub and I forgot to take a second picture of him but I want to post and say that we had his assessment today and it went really well - he and Maria were both 'good' and no one had any kind of major hissy, so that's good. He did freak out a little at one point, but one of the therapists was trying to get a reaction out of him and she did!

It seems like it would be really, really good for Anthony. We are going to try to go the insurance route, of course, but man I do not have a good feeling about it. Because Mike is an employee of our federal government, his insurance provider does not have to abide by the mandate for insurance coverage for autism treatment. BUT they do cover some therapy and we're getting a letter from his doctor so we'll see. And otherwise we are just going to take a huge loan on our house - and it's no big deal, really. We were thinking of going to a 15 year mortgage and refinancing and now we just won't. Since we are going to (evidently) have children until we are well into our 50's, there's no point in paying the mortgage off early anyway right? :) We'll know more in a few weeks but we are going to proceed with a refinancing anyway and just decide what amount we borrow here soon.

I told Mike today in many ways, it's like we were built for an autistic child. I mean, obviously NOT my personality, but everything else. I'm so glad that we were so rigid and inflexible about his sleep schedule when he was little because I feel like he really is benefiting from that routine now. Mike is in a position where he can really be home on time, come home for lunch, and not travel a lot, leaving me alone with them. We bought our house with some equity already in it, since I had owned it with my sister, and so now we can afford to borrow more on it and not in a way that will ruin us financially. Anthony is SUPER cute and I swear, everyone seems to like him - and they always comment on how 'happy' he is and really, he is. He's noisy and braying and drives us mad but he is mostly very happy and fun to be around and that, I find, is really working for finding therapists that want to help him.

Now the only thing is that we have to make this work in just one year because we can't keep refinancing the house! I am hoping that in a year's time, hopefully I will have learned more about ABA therapy and maybe I can continue what they do this year, next year, when I am not pregnant (God willing) and don't have an infant and a toddler as well as Anthony, but a toddler and an ... older toddler. We have to really keep the 'early' in 'early intervention' here and strike while the iron is hot. Even with the assessment today I think it will be a month, and since they only have a morning window available for Anthony, he'd have to stop going to school which sort of breaks my heart to think about, so maybe we'd put it off until May? So we have a while to sort out all of our options. But at least this first step went well and we'll just keep moving forward from here.