aeh - I will look into social communication disorder. That is a good suggestion, and from your description it sounds like it could fit. I've read a lot about ASD and it's never really seemed to fit right. I am also looking at a expressive language LD.
polerbear - Intellectually I know all these things, but emotionally it's still a roller coaster. The plan was to wait for a summer to do an evaluation. End of the school year is just too busy. This psychologist doesn't do testing herself, she refers out and already has someone in mind. We just haven't gotten there yet.
My DD's diagnosis was more an evolution. My DD had a whole host of health problems when she was 0-2 years. One was that she was born with a cleft palate. But she also had gross motor delay, and atypical febrile seizure that took a while a a few different doctors and treatments to diagnose. Because of the cleft, she started private speech at 2yrs that medial issuance was helping to cover. But I wisely had her evaluated by the school district for speech the year before K. So she started K with a speech & language IEP. She did fine in K, all the speech therapy probably helped. But in 1st grade started to fall behind in reading quite drastically. Her 3 year evaluation for the speech IEP was due in 2nd grade coincidentally around the earliest they would test her for LD's. So without a lot of effort on my part they did a full evaluation and picked up the language processing issues. In 3rd grade we had her privately evaluated for ADHD and it was one of the tests that doctor did that made the LD really "pop" for me. He concluded that the LD was obvious and kids with language processing LD's often have some of the same inattention issues as ADD kids. He recommended treatment for the language processing and not putting her on ADD meds. And it was about that time I was refereed to educational therapy for her. This seems to be mostly successful. She not only graduated H.S. but she has just completed her 2nd year of college where she is studying photography.
