Got The Developmental Optometrist Report Today

[Joyofsixreboot]

It's not surprising the child can't write on the line. He apparently has suppression, convergence insufficiencies, retained primitive reflexes and poor motor control of his eyes. ~sign~ He begins vision therapy on Tuesday for a projected 10 months. He'll also have his glasses replaced with a contact. I'm glad we can help him but the cost :glare: and driving 80 miles a week aren't exciting me. So all you vision therapy mavens, did you see some improvements within 2 or 3 months? I'm thinking I'll need to have results to keep him self motivated.

[rafiki]

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[PeterPan]

Did the eye doc give you exercises for the retained primitive reflexes or refer you to an OT? We didn't have those, but I've read they can be integrated in a month, meaning you're going to see changes pretty quickly.

 

No, you're not talking 2-3 months to see changes, lol. You'll see changes WEEKLY, definitely within a month. It will be little changes at first, just basically being able to do the tasks. At the one month mark we had big changes, by 2 months even bigger, that sort of thing. I'm trying to remember exactly. I think around one month she stopped whomping into things so much. Then it got worse because we shifted from working on single eyes to working on binocular. More whomping, then it decreased and went away again for good. At two months she started trying to sound out words, something she had NEVER done before. By three months I realized she could catch a ball, from any distance, even if my throwing was off. We actually finished our basic stuff (convergence, focusing, etc.) in 3 months, took some time off for a trip to Alaska (wow, yeah), then came back and did more VT to work on visual processing. The visual processing stage is less arduous, but we finally hit a wall after a couple months where her working memory wouldn't let her go forward. They thought if she had some more OT it would help chill things a bit. We paused the OT (we were way overloaded and totally burnt out, between stuff for her and my ds), so we never went back. It would be nice to finish out that last month they wanted, but even so things are astounding.

 

So is this the ds10? Just so you know, VT totally wore my dd out. In retrospect, I wish we had gotten math done each day more faithfully. Other than that, let it go, all the academics, and just focus on getting the VT done. That's my advice. If you need permission to dump everything to do VT, you have it.

[Joyofsixreboot]

How often will he have in office Vision Therapy?.

 

In office once a week for an hour and then 5 more days/ week at home.

[PeterPan]

Yup, that's how we did it. With the amount of driving, it was better for us to do 1 hour (1/2 hour sessions with a 1/2 hour break between) than to do separate days. We progressed just fine.

[Joyofsixreboot]

Did the eye doc give you exercises for the retained primitive reflexes or refer you to an OT? we'll be working on them with the VT

 

So is this the ds10? Yes, he just turned 10.Just so you know, VT totally wore my dd out. In retrospect, I wish we had gotten math done each day more faithfully. Other than that, let it go, all the academics, and just focus on getting the VT done. That's my advice. If you need permission to dump everything to do VT, you have it. Good to know what's ahead of him

 

This is uncharted territory for us so I'll probably be asking lots of questions. Thanks for your reply.

[PeterPan]

Sounds like a plan! :)

[Rikki06]

I just got my DS's list of 13 assessments and it's quite overwhelming. He's been in vision therapy about a month now, though, and every week his therapist sees improvement. We just stick with consistent home therapy and he gets to take 1 day off for a good attitude the rest of the time. It works!