Today was a day with some mixed feelings. As I mentioned yesterday, we went to Heartsprings for Bubbie today to have his hearing checked and he also saw a Speech Therapist(ST) to evaluate where he stands compared to where he should be. On most things he fell under the normal range for his age, on a couple of things they were on the low end. The ST said mostly, Bubbie is "too smart for his britches." Actual words used. She said that Bubbie knows all the tricks to trying to get him to speak, so he will just shut down because he knows that he can't speak well. She told us that most kids that have trouble talking, don't know they have trouble and just talk and talk even though no one understands them. That is not the case with Bubbie.
I say we have mixed feelings about all of this because the speech evaluation did confirm that Bubbie does comprehend very well, in fact exceptionally well. On some of the things she asked Bubbie, we were amazed that he knew. I guess we had discounted so much with him that we were happy to see that he is very knowledgable of shapes, colors, his eyes, nose, mouth and ears. He also did very well on picking things out on a page with pictures. That made us so proud, to know that he has picked up so much.
Bubbie will have to go for some speech therapy to help improve his pronunciation and forming of two word sentences. His biggest trouble is with consonants and they said that he should be able to pronounce those by now. They also want to work on his understanding of yours, mine, you and me. Though honestly, I believe that he does understand those, but his attention span had run out by the time she got to that. The ST said that he might understand those, but that he was too distracted for her to know for sure.
So I suppose this is another stepping stone of our life with kids. We are almost off of the stepping stone of Boo's SVT and now its time for us to get on the stepping stone of speech therapy. I'm sure as they grow, there will be many stepping stones for Bubbie and Boo to conquer.
That must be hard, Erin. The important part, though, is that you guys are taking all the right steps in getting him the help that he needs. He'll be caught up in no time, I'm sure!
ReplyDeleteErin, I would swear you are talking about my bubba. Back in Aug (he was 2.5)we too saw a ST at Heartspring. His receptive understanding was awesome but his speech was delayed. We were on the wait list to start ST twice a week. We moved here and we got a call that they finally had a spot for him; but he no longer needs it. I had him re-evaluated and while he had problems with articulation, his speech is right where it should be! I know how stressed you are, but I swear he'll catch up! If you ever need to talk/vent, I'm here!
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