Bebellyboo

So finally, here is the long-awaited post about Little D’s speech delay.  Actually, this is a long-awaited post in general because I. Am. The. Worst. Blogger. Ever.  It seems I can only write blog posts when I am very tired and slap happy.  That would explain all the silliness.

Anyway, so Little D has a significant speech delay.  I know what you are thinking.  You are like, “Wait!  He has severe food allergies? And probable Celiac?  And asthma?  And refuses to eat most foods?  And a speech delay?  WHAT is up with your child?” 

I know, right?!  , I have no idea why he has so many issues.  I guess he lost the baby-good-genes lottery.  But before you feel too bad for us, Hone always says, “Yeah, but he won the most important lottery of all.  He got you as a mom.”  Awwwwwwwwwwwww!  Sniffle.

ANYWAY, so Little D did all the babbling that little babies do at all the appropriate ages and such.  But when he got to be about a year he seemed a little behind.  No reason for worries.  I mean, developmental age ranges are ranges and so we thought he was likely a late talker.  He understood us just fine and was starting to sign up a storm.  But then 18 months rolled around and he had 2 spoken words.  Then 2 years rolled around and he had 4 spoken words.  He had over 200 ASL signs and communicated very well with sign language but no speech.  So we started looking for a speech therapist. 

Our first therapist seemed super awesome.  She was all, “I don’t push kids”  and “diagnoses are less important to me than how the kid is doing” and “blah dee dee blah dee blah”.  I liked this at first but then quickly realized that her “philosophy” seemed more about not having any accountability.  AND she also seemed to have a skewed view of who I was as a mom.  Like, when she found out we weren’t doing preschool (and planning to homeschool) she seemed convinced that I was some sort of crazy shut-in, forcing my poor little child to watch the world from behind the windows of our home, never to interact with a single soul.  I was like, “Dude, we do playgroups and are out and about all the time.”  But whatever.  She was one of those perfectly put together moms with the tan and the highlighted hair and the matching outfits.  I am . . . not. 

We met with her a few times and it had absolutely no impact on Little D.  THEN she pissed me off when I wrote her this message telling her that Little D had spontaneously said the word “night”  and wasn’t that wonderful and she was all  “you need to be around other kids so you can see where his speech should be and so you and he can socialize.”   I was like, “We hired you as a SPEECH THERAPIST, clearly we realize his speech is not where it should be! You are not the right fit for us,”  and went in search of a better person. 

And I found one.  OMG, our current speech therapist is truly awesome.  Not only is she completely fluent in ASL (she works with a lot of hearing impaired kids) but she is also trained to work with kids with apraxia.  And she figured out that Little D has apraxia almost immediately.  Now technically it is hard to diagnosis it before the age of three.  But she has had a ton of experience with kids with apraxia and she is very sure Little D has some form of it.  AND she started approaching speech therapy with him as if he did and guess what?  In 6 weeks he went from 4 spoken words to over 100.  Yeah.  YEAH.  Now here we are four months into speech therapy with her and I’ve stopped counting his words.  He talks all the time.

BUT here is the thing.  Apraxia is strange.  Basically, and this is a very simplified unscientific description of it, Little D’s brain is missing some connections.  Specifically, the connections that are involved in oral planning.  It is very hard for him to get the shape of a word right.  He has to grope around and listen to his own voice AND be guided in how to shape his mouth to get a specific sound.  Obviously, this last part is hard for a 2.5 year old.  So, speech therapy is going to get easier and easier as he gets older and can consciously direct his own speech.  So when I say he has many many words now and talks all the time, it’s all relative.  He’s still very much behind most kids his age.  Very often we have to look at the context of his words and the intonation to guess at what he is saying.  But it is amazing how well that works.  Two weeks ago he was saying  “tagid” for “guitar” and just today he said “dig-ga.”  It may not seem like much but it shows how his approximations are getting more accurate.  And he does have a lot of clear words.  He rocks out with any words that rhyme with “pear” and says “bubble” and “purple” perfectly.  But generally, for him, learning to speak is going to be about habituating words.  He will just have to practice and practice and practice until that forges a little connection in his brain kind of by brute force as opposed to the more automatic way that most kids learn.  And the good thing is that his receptive language is totally on track.  I think all his signing helped with that.

So here is a teeny tiny video snippet of a speech therapy session.  In it you’ll see our speech therapist using the PROMPT technique which helps a lot with kids with apraxia.  It is based on the idea that you can cue kids on what muscles and parts of their mouths they use to make certain sounds and this helps them get a word.  In this snippet she is working on the “n” sound.  The cue for that is to touch Little D’s nose to show him that the “n” sound comes from his nose.  The super cute thing about Little D is that he totally uses these cues himself and you’ll see it in the video that he grabs his own nose.  This is from a few weeks ago when he was just starting to get the “n” sound.  Today for the first time he said, “onnnnnne”  and “ninnnnne” when he was counting.  He has not used the “n” sound in either of those words without prompting before.  Progress progress!