Jack - A Speech Update

Jack is doing an absolutely stellar job at speech therapy. I can't believe how quickly he has picked up on many of the sounds. He says p, b, d, g, t, c initial sounds almost all the time without prompting now!!! He is still working on f, j, th, s, sh, but those are coming as well. Amazing what a great speech therapist can accomplish in a short amount of time. Suzie (his therapist) is wonderful and she just adores Jack. Last week she proclaimed that Jack was the cutest client she'd had in all her 23 years of experience! He gets so excited every time he succeeds. It is definitely adorable, you can't help but have your heart melted by that little guy!

As I mentioned above, he is not able to say his f's at the beginning of his words very well, so the other morning when he came running in to my room I was a little perplexed to hear him yelling "Mom, change me ass, ass, ass!" It took me a minute to realize that he was TRYING to say, "Mom, change me fast, fast, fast!" Yikes.

Today he brought me his little red backpack and in true Dr. Seuss fashion said "Mom, put Jack-Jack packback on Jack-Jack back!" Oh, I love that little guy! :)

One last funny thing: We bought Jack some really rockin' Lightening McQueen undies in the hopes that he would show some small bit of interest in potty training. That was a month ago. No luck. This afternoon he found them in his jammy drawer and brought them downstairs to show me with a very excited face. "I wear McQueen, Mommy?" I said, "Sure, but you have to go potty in the toilet if you wear these cool undies, OK?" After a long pause he replied "I put them back, Mommy, K?" So much for that awesome plan. It was good for a laugh anyway.

As my friend Amber observed, I wonder how long Jack has been saying these adorable little things and we just couldn't understand him. Poor little dude, learning to speak has got to be a huge relief!

Jack's Speech Update

We visited the speech therapist yesterday for the first time (just an initial evaluation). She was great with him and helped me understand some issues that I hadn't related to his speech troubles before. Basically, he has a speech pattern called "H substitution" -- it's considered a unique (rare) impediment, but she assured me that every child she's ever worked with who has that particular problem has been able to fix it without too much difficulty. She asked me a series of questions about his eating preferences and habits, and I was amazed to realized that the reason he often spits out giant mouthfuls of food is because he has a weak tongue which makes it difficult to chew. It's simply not worth the effort to him to struggle through the chewing in order to get the food down. He's done this (and been a great frustration to me) since he was tiny -- and I could never figure out why. Now I know, and it's so wonderful to have a way to start to help the problem. So far they've just given me a few suggestions of ways to help him strengthen his tongue. Eating peanut butter is a good way, also licking ice cream, sticking out your tongue, and holding a smartie to the roof of your mouth. Weird (yet fun) huh? I'm very thankful for knowledge and for people who study these things. I know this therapy is really going to impact his little life for the better.

Jackanese Update

Jack has had a veritable word/sentence explosion lately -- unfortunately it is still fairly difficult to understand. So with a little help from my visiting teachers (both of whom have had children with the same types of problems) I was able to contact a childhood development center that could help Jack. They came to the house and played with Jack for about an hour to evaluate his cognitive/motor/language abilities. They were so great with him! He had a ball playing with them, showing off, and really trying to mimic everything they said and did. It was so cute to watch him have such a fun time. They just loved him and kept saying what a doll he was. In fact, they ended up staying and playing with him about twice as long and they usually do because they were having so much fun with him. :)

At the end of the session one of the therapists said he is SO smart. Cognitively and in terms of fine and gross motor skills he is way above his peers, but he is just having difficulty with articulation. I had basically thought the same thing, but it was good to hear from a professional. She referred him to an articulation therapist at Cassia Regional Hospital in Burley. We will be going there for an evaluation tomorrow morning and then should be able to start therapy very soon. It will be so good for him to have something intensive to help fix this problem before it becomes an issue for him. He's just getting to the age where he's starting to be frustrated that I can't understand everything he says. I think if I ignore this problem he'll become a very unhappy/unpleasant little boy. A lot of behavior problems in children come from frustrations about learning or communication difficulties.

I'll update after our appointment tomorrow.