Burn Like A Star

 "Burn like a star, Light a fire in our hearts" - Rend Collective

Ruby burns like a star. And how... She is the fire in our hearts.

Not just because she is the star in my tattoo, not just because she is a rockstar, but because she is constantly shining in the darkness around her as a pure light.

I love this song (Burn Like A Star), and it makes me think of Ruby every time. This week especially, she is shining like the star she is. My one-on-one speech time with her has been fairly productive in the last week, and I'm hearing words randomly more and more. Not always in the right order (tonight she said, "bye-bye, ook, mama, bye" as she waved to her "Llama Llama" book on the dresser after we read it"), and not always with full articulation ("ook" for book, "nana" for banana, "een" for green), but it's coming.

Today was her first parent-teacher conference. We requested an 'assessment' from her teachers a few weeks back in preparation for her Cobb County evaluation (which will lead to an IEP for her in a Special Needs Pre-K in the fall). The areas where Ruby was not performing as well as we would like were absolutely expected (speaking-related tasks). What wasn't expected was how well she performs for them with so many of the other 'typical' 2 year old areas. It would be easy to look at her assessment form, full of checks in all three levels of success (ranging from not successful to successful), and get down about it, but honestly, I'm super excited that there are plenty of successful checks!

Tomorrow Ruby will be evaluated by therapists and educators for a few hours while they take copious notes regarding her levels of speech, physical abilities, fine motor skills, etc. A report with their 'findings' will follow that, and we will have an IEP meeting scheduled. At this meeting, the types of services and frequency will be discussed and decided. There is much anxiety around this process, but at the moment I am pretty calm about it. Right now there is nothing I can do (nor do I know what i should/could do) regarding tomorrow's evaluation, so I'm just planning on a morning of seeing what Ruby has up her sleeve. If she's a rockstar (duh), then yay. If she's not giving them her full focus, then she qualifies for more. Sounds like a win-win?