Check out Noa at NYC’s Veteran’s Day Parade – sucking on her zipper, listening to marching bands and waving the old Red, White and Blue while our troops march up Fifth Ave!
Going to the Parade was a Daddy/Noa date (NYU didn’t take the holiday, but Noa’s school did). Noa got a flag at the parade and – as you can see from the photos here – she really took to flag waving. She held onto the flag for the rest of the afternoon. She even took it with her to the potty!
In other news, we all 
had reason to celebrate when we got news that we were going to be able to switch our Social Services to a new Organization: SKIP of NY which unlike our previous (non-functional) service organization which shall remain nameless, actually specializes in working with kids. We did our intake meeting with SKIP and they gave us piles of paperwork to fill out.
They also surprised us by explaining that the wavier service that we’d been approved for (back when we nearly had to go to court to keep Noa’s Medicaid waiver) was somthing called Home and Community Habiliation – rather than Family Education (which was what we thought we were getting).
Shortest way to explain this: to get a Medicaid Wavier you have to prove you have an approved Medicaid Waiver Service (not all Medicaid Waiver services make you Medicaid Waiver eligible). Head hurt? Don’t worry, just trust me – you need to be approved for one of a handful of services that vary from inconvenient to very useful.
We thought we’d been approved for Family Education – which would mean that we had to go to a class to learn about raising a disabled child.
What we had in fact gotten is something that is much more useful, and apparently really hard to get because it’s more expensive: Home and Community Habiliation – which would be someone coming into the home to work with Noa, teaching her various self-care and life skills like brushing her teeth, or buttoning, or whatever – once a week for three hours a week!!!
This sounds great, right? Here’s the thing – we should have been getting that since JULY! (which is yet another reason to call the previous organization non-functional). I called and called them to set up the Family Education – but they never called me back. Funny. Ha.
Needless to say we are THRILLED that we have been approved to transfer services to SKIP as of the beginning of December. In just the one meeting with them we learned more than we’d learned in nearly four years with the “other.” So that’s a big victory here at home!!
The Land of Noa 