So, basically the details Kirin gave were sparse, in part, because the details are sparse at this point.

Basically, Early Start contracts out the therapy / treatment / whathaveyou to a company called Stepping Stones (presumably this one). They’re supposed to get in touch with us by the end of the month to set things up for the month of May. So far we like what we see from the website, assuming it’s the right one 🙂

Anyhow, for the month of May, they’re contracted for 15 hours a week of time with Tristan (here in our own home) – they’ll be bringing in various folks to our home to come work with Tristan and figure out what the most appropriate strategy is for now. 15 hours seems simultaneously like a lot, and like nothing – some of the therapies you read about can actually range from 20-40 hours a week, by themselves – but even 3 hours a (week) day seems like a significant portion of his day.

Additionally, they’re allowed to give us (as in the parents) 11 hours of education of some form (hopefully some general, but hopefully some related to getting us up to speed with whatever they’re going to be using to work with Tristan.) Not quite sure how that will play out, but we’ll find out soon enough.

At the end of May, they’ll make their proposals on what they think will work best for him, and we’ll meet with the coordinator from Early Start and the folks who will have been working with Tristan to finalize the tentative plan for the next six months as far as what therapies and how much of them there will be – it’s sort of hard to determine what that will entail, as a large part of it will be based on what happens in the month of therapy.

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Tristan’s doing more neat (but fairly classic autistic-y) things, as well. Yesterday and today, we found that he’d fairly reliably echo “ha-ha-ha” said in descending tones (which, given that he rarely is interested in replicating sounds seems like somewhat a good thing). He’s also started grabbing my hand to indicate that he needs help with something (notably: playdoh) as well. He’ll also pretty reliably happy when I get home from work – I came in and laid on the ground near him, and he came over to give me a hug. Then again, when we let Samurai in, he did pretty much the same thing to him 🙂