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Our son, Gavin, was born in 2009 and due to unforseen events during his birth he went without oxygen for some time. He has been diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy. While Gavin is the toughest boy I have ever had the honor of knowing, his life is faced with many challenges. His life began with 23 LONG days in the NICU. While he was there he began seeing speech and physical therapists. He had a tough time learning to eat and his muscles were very floppy. We began seeing therapists in Chicago at Lurie's Children's Hospital when he was only 5 months old. He now sees physical, occupational, and speech therapists along with neurologists, orthotists, and orthopedics. There are a ton of expenses that go into Gavin's care. After many years of intense therapy in Chicago and at home we still have a long road ahead of us. He is still unable to walk, self feed, speak clearly, toilet himself or do other fine motor activities. Despite all of the that he is extremely intelligent and self motivated.
Gavin will be starting Kindergarten at the end of this month. As you can imagine my husband and I are a nervous wreck. Since Gavin is cognitively where he should be he will be attending a General Education class. We are very excited for him, but it is not without obstacles. We are concerned that he will have difficulty keeping up with the class socially. We fear he won't be able to interact with his peers or the adults due to his speech delays. The school has given us a dinosaur piece of equipment to help interact, but it is not up to date or suitable for Gavin. We have gone through an assitive technology evaluation at the Rehab Institute of Chicago and they found that an iPad with an app called Touch Chat AAC with Word Power would be the most appopriate for him. There are also key guards that will make it easier for him to target the choices he is attempting to make. We have been working with an iPad and the app at Lurie's this summer and he has done brilliantly with it!
He will not only be able to use the iPad for speech interaction, but it will also help him to read, write, perform mathmatical tasks, and all around function in the classroom.
Having this device will give Gavin a fighting chance to succeed in a General Education classroom. We truly thank you from the bottom of our hearts for reading our story and getting to know our amazing little boy!
With Love,
Stacey and Rick Hemphill
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