A Sad Goodbye (Therapy Update)

Our OT Misty was returning voice-mails late last night, and broke the very sad news that TODAY was Kittyboy's last day with Janna SL! We were quite sad, and so we made sure to get a picture of Kittyboy with The One Who Got Him Talking.

She's trying to get him to BLOW on the pinwheel - he's trying to show her, "Look, there's an easier way, you just spin it like this!"
Last August, Kittyboy was evaluated to have an 85% delay in communication - he had maybe half a dozen signs (for the basics, eat, drink, more, please, thank you, night-night) and babbled on the level of a four-month old. He was 18 months, chronological age. He rarely signed without prompting - he would bring a book and bang the corner into your leg saying, "MM! MM!" rather than hand it to you and sign please. We had eliminated basic hunger and thirst as a cause for tantrums, but he still collapsed in tears on a regular basis for no discernable reason, because he couldn't SAY, "Mommy, I can't find my teddy bear" "Mommy, I want to go outside" "Mommy, I want peas instead of corn for lunch". Boy, oh boy, did he qualify for Speech therapy.
Some time last September or October, maybe the second or third time she saw him, Janna SL said, "I think he's trying to say it with his mouth closed. Has he ever been diagnosed with oral aphasia?" And thus began a voyage of discovery - he was indeed trying to copy speech, but wasn't opening his mouth. Either didn't realize he had to, or thought it WAS open (when he was learning to drink through a straw, we had many problems with milk spilling out because he would forget to close his lips). What a difference it made, when instead of sighing, "Please, don't WHINE!" we started asking him what he was trying to SAY. The whining tone slowly disappeared as he realized he was finally being listened to - and we slowly learned to distinguish between mm, ng, gng, gm, and all the other noises he made with his mouth closed. We still had no clue what he was trying to say, but we could tell that one was different from another, and that was a start. It took off from there.
So this is the lady who got him talking. When Kittyboy runs up to me and says "Mommy, [sign for help]!" I thank God for Janna. Now that he knows how communication works (and that he is fully capable of it) he dives into it headlong - he hybridizes signs to approximate a word for which he doesn't have a sign, he makes up signs sometimes, he parrots words all day long, and he'll attempt words that are difficult by just taking the first syllable and repeating it. Je-je for Jesus. And usually (usually), he does it without us having to push him back, unwrap his fingers from our clothing, and say, "Stop whining and TELL US!" I had described it to Janna as his baby chimp act - pulling on us, trying to climb us, and whining unintelligibly. He has baby chimp moments, but it's not ALL DAY LONG.
Misty will be finding us another SLT, or possibly our EI coordinator will. I'm sure it will be someone good, either way, we've had wonderful therapists all around - but I need to print and frame that picture, of Kittyboy and The One Who Got Him Talking (and saved our sanity!).
We will miss Janna very much. May God bless her work and all the lives she touches. She touched ours in a BIG way.

Good, Grand, Glorious News in the Speech Department

Kittyboy performed so marvelously in his Speech eval this morning, I think we'll probably lose Janna the SLT next month. We may hold onto her for another half-year, but I kind of doubt it. Not only is his expressive vocabulary growing by an average of a word a day, but he said "airplane" this morning! Okay, so it was more like "ay-pay" but it was a two syllable word, the two syllables of which are totally different from each other. It was obvious what he meant, we called the winged vehicle in his hand an airplane and he instantly responded with the word. THAT was amazing.
Janna said he obviously comprehends far, far more than he can express. We already knew this, but she was quite impressed at the extent to which that's true. And having gotten a taste of what communication - gestured or spoken - will get him, he's constantly looking to use it whenever possible. So he's sort of to the point of teaching himself! He's pushing his own boundaries now, of his own accord - eagerly and with gusto!
Ginny the OT, we will most likely have for another six months to practice sitting, completing tasks, and following instructions. Then we'll say goodbye to her too. Unless the school district has a concern they think warrants following, we will be completely sans therapists by November. How weird would THAT be? No one taking notes, evaluating, re-evaluating, checking things, asking questions, saying, "Here's what we're working on next..." Just us and a healthy, normal, scarily bright toddler.
Let's just hope God knows what He's doing, shall we? He's not SUPPOSED to give us more than we can handle. Would it be irreverent to say, I hope He remembers that?

The Thursday Habit

I didn't realized I'd posted all THAT much on Thursdays about Kittyboy's therapy, but what do you know - I didn't post yesterday, and this morning I had a call from my grandmother pointing out that she didn't yet have stories about her great-grandson from yesterday! (I e-mail her my blog entries)
So, amusing stories of therapy!
Every week, he dives into Janna and Ginny's bags to ransack them for his favorite toys. They have big tote bags full to the brim of lovely things for Kittyboys and girls to play with, rather like Santa - puzzles, books, puppets, dolls, trains, ring-stackers, shape-sorters, all sorts of things. I do believe he even knows by now which bags hold which toys, the better to find his favorites in a timely manner. Until yesterday, his all-time favorite of Janna's was a Fisher Price farm. This last week, however, we had a lovely surprise in the mail. My aunt in California sent us a package! A LARGE package, just out of the blue, with a Christmas gift inside, and a note saying she "hoped it wasn't too young for him". He tore the paper off the front and went hog-wild, pardon the pun, bouncing up and down saying, "Moo moo! Moo moo! Moo moo! Moo moo! Moo moo!" pounding on the box. It was his very own Fisher Price farm!! I could NOT get it out of the box fast enough for him, especially since I was undoing twist-ties with one hand while fending him off with the other as he jumped on ME, still frantically mooing. (He knows what cows say! BOY, does he know what cows say!) I had to just rip the animals out with the cardboard still attached, to distract him while I pulled on the barn itself. Somehow, I got everything out without anything being broken OR the Kittyboy's little brain going POP from over-excitement.
So, since he had been playing with his very own farm all week, Janna's farm wasn't the first thing he went for. The thing that amused him most turned out to be her boxes of flash-cards. The big box of cards has different sections in it, depending on the relative difficulty of the words. The first section is the two-syllable repetitive ones - ma-ma, da-da, moo-moo, nay-nay, baa-baa, and so forth. Next are two syllable words with different vowels, like mommy, daddy, baby, etc. It's like "Talking for Dummies", not to imply that children who need extensive help and practice to speak are unintelligent, but it's that sort of VERY basic, broken-down, step-by-step instruction. Well, for some reason he wanted those cards more than anything else. We went through cards again and again - then we would try to do a puzzle. He got maybe five pieces out of the eight piece puzzle, then he was DONE and wanted the cards again. Then we tried a stacking toy, which was going to become a tantrum when he decided again he was all done. Boy, those cards were just the coolest thing. He wanted the Mama and Dada cards in particular. At one point, when he was DONE with a book, he picked up the box saying "Mama! Mama!" Janna played dumb and pulled out ALL the cards and went through them one by one, pretending to not understand which one he wanted. "Woof woof?" "Mama!" "Peep peep?" "Mama!" "Nay nay?" "Mama!" After a few cards, he started walking in circles in front of her saying, "Mama Mama Mama Mama Mama Mama Mama Mama..." until she pulled out the right card.
Pretty much the only NEW thing yesterday is that he is more and more imitating what we say right when we say it, so he is imitating more consistently. He did say Bye-bye when we left! And he is beginning to make two-syllable noises for two-syllable words, even if it's just "nn-nn" or "mm-mm". It's just when he hears the words, he's not initiating conversation, but just seeing imitation of ANY sort regularly is terrific! It makes it easier to put up with the screams, squeals, grunts and growls he uses on a daily basis. We're getting there!

Speech frustration

In other news, I have a box collecting of the 'small and cheap' toys for Freecycle, and have one new addition to the toy collection - actually one more collection that's been added. Kittyboy has four little baby dolls, complete with high chair, rocking horse, and sleeping basket. And he is the happiest child around! They're his babies, and he feeds them, rocks them, and makes them go night-night. Thank you, Lisa from Freecycle! They are WELL loved!
To be candid, I am feeling the same as I did last year, when strangers were guessing Kittyboy to be half his age based on his gross motor skills and lack of babbling, except this year it's me looking at other two year olds who SAY WORDS, and in particular a six month old baby at church who babbles about like he does. Six months old, but she opens her mouth more than my son, and so when she babbles, she sounds really advanced to me. Well, I could say Kittyboy has improved by two months over when he was evaluated at 18 months to have the vocal skills of a four month old. So he's up to the six month level. That's after weekly speech therapy since September. And I am once more suspecting auditory processing as a problem. You ask him "what does a cow say?" and he signs Cow, as if what he understands is "say cow", and so he obliges. We can get a moo on rare occasion, but very rarely, more often he doesn't seem to know what we're asking. It took me forever to figure out that when he goes "Nggg!" in the car, he's actually pointing at something and, apparently, is asking about it or telling us about it. It's NOT a whine because he wants to be out of the car, or because we stopped at a light. But that's how we've treated it for months, with him escalating louder and louder before dropping the subject. How many chances to tell him about his world did we completely miss because we didn't know what he was trying to communicate, and how frustrating must it have been for him wanting to know about that big machine at the construction site we were passing, or pointing out birds, and being told to be quiet instead? He CAN talk, he CAN make noise and CAN open his mouth, but he doesn't. If it's because he isn't hearing US clearly, including not putting words in the right order, that would most certainly make it very difficult to learn how to talk. VERY difficult. But you can't test processing until he's five, six, seven years old. Speech therapy is the only therapy I see being referred to the school district in 11 months.

signing fun

Just investigated the Tractor Supply Company store near Meijer. Farming stores have the bestest toys! Kittyboy has a kitty and a doggie (specifically a Bernese Mountain dog), chosen from a wide variety of molded plastic animals. That's part of what I love about farm stores' toy sections, the realistic and even breed-specific animals. You can choose between an Angus, Brahman, or Charolais bull for your farm, and for dogs they had dalmations, Bernese, labs, and a couple others. So we got a yellow tabby cat and a Bernese Mountain dog, and over the weekend I'll figure out what other animal he's most likely to encounter in books, learn the sign for it, and get one of those. Then we'll play "What's this?" going through kitty, doggie, and the new critter. His farm will expand as he learns the signs for the animals.

We're working on combining Please with other signs, so that it's actually a request. Right now he signs Please whenever he wants ANYTHING, but without a sign to tell you for what he is saying Please. So we're working on Eat Please, Drink Please, Read Please. His current method of saying that he wants to read a book is to throw it in my lap while signing Please, and if I'm in the middle of something he starts commanding, loudly, "MMMM! MMMM!" and if that doesn't work, will start hitting my leg with the book. It escalates pretty steadily. And it gets old, FAST, especially since I often say "Wait" just out of principle to try and teach him to wait, even a moment or so, for what he wants. So now instead of Wait, I ask him, "Please what?" and sign Book/Read. Ideally, he will start phrasing requests for specifically what he wants, or the sign closest to what he wants, and it would cut down on the frustration for both of us.

Oh, and Janna SL (the new one, speech/language) is helping us start PECS, Picture Exchange Communication System. We're trying to get him to choose between things, like having a picture of bubbles and a picture of a book, and whichever he picks is what we do.

And he'll talk eventually. Really, he will!

First appointment with SL

Guess what - there's basically not a thing Speech can do that we're not trying to do already.

AAARRRGGGHH!

He's just going to talk really late, that's all there is to it. You can lead a horse to water, but not make him drink - you can put a toddler in his bed, but not make him sleep - and you can say "ball! ball! buh-buh ball!" 'til the cows come home, and if he's not in a "b" mood, buh-buh-buh will never happen. He knows what a ball is, he likes them very much, throwing and fetching, but he absolutely will not say buh on command. I'm beginning to think he doesn't see the point. He KNOWS the colorful sphere is a ball - why bother to SAY it? The same for kitty, doggie, all that. What silly grownups we are, that we want HIM to tell us what a ball is and what a kitty is.

Our "home assignment" - business as usual!

Speech and Language Therapy is COMING!!!!!!

I just have to celebrate, Kittyboy was evaluated this morning for S/L, which is speech/language. His speech/feeding therapist did the eval, and finished it with "Now, I don't want to upset you, but even at his adjusted age [about three months less than actual age], he REALLY qualifies for therapy. I'm going to recommend weekly, because he really needs it!"
What's to get upset about? Hey, when the 19-month-old's biggest VOCAL achievement to date was Mama and Dada a couple weeks ago (he did babble before, it just wasn't specific yet), it's pretty obvious there's a need here! I'm just as excited as all get-out that the need definitely showed up in the testing, so he'll be definitely getting therapy, instead of him magically doing things he never does for us, for the therapist, and then it being only our word that "No, seriously, he DOESN'T TALK."
At least, since he started walking in late April, no one's guessing him to be half his age anymore. People used to, when at 16 months he was babbling as if he were 4-6 months and crawling all over but not taking a step. "Oh, what a precious baby! How old, 8, 9 months old?"
My toddler babbles, for the most part, on only a 4-6 month level! I'm ecstatic! (What a bizarre reason to rejoice!)