Friday, May 4, 2012

Music Therapy Update!

Last month I posted about the Family Connection Conference and a music therapy workshop I attended. I was determined to try to get funding so Joshua could get Music Therapy. A friend told me about The Lindsay Foundation, she has a child with special needs and has received funding from them for her son's specialty therapies and equipment. I decided I had nothing to lose and everything to gain so I contacted them, filled out a form and waited. They said they had a meeting mid-April during which they would review requests and make approvals. I got a call 2 weeks ago from The Lindsay Foundation that they had approved my request for Joshua's music therapy! I couldn't believe it! They said they had never approved a request for music therapy before but they had received some. I don't know why they chose to approve Joshua's request but they did. He is getting 6 months of music therapy starting this month and they want a progress report in 90 days.

I immediately contacted Natalie at Key Changes Music Therapy, the one whose presentation I went to in March, told her that Joshua was approved and scheduled our first session which was today! The first two sessions are assessments and one of those was today. She does one session with the parents and one without, since Jamie went with us today and he had never met her before we did this session with us in the room. It went great! When we got there Joshua was a little hesitant at first but once he saw the room with all the musical instruments in it he went straight in there. They played with drums, bells and maracas but Joshua discovered his favorite instrument pretty quickly and it was no surprise, the guitar. As soon as she started to sing and play he was happy. After a few songs he started dancing, bouncing and smiling. He only came over to me once, he would have been just as happy without us there. I was thrilled but I had a pretty good felling it would go well. Every time she put down the guitar to try to get him to play with something else he went right back over to it. She wanted him to strum it, he would grab her hand and try to make her strum it. It was so nice to get that confirmation that I was hoping would happen. It just fell into place like it was supposed to, it felt like it was meant to be. Since this is a rare thing in my life or at least feels like it is when it happens I have to try to be as grateful as possible.