sutton010

As I mentioned, almost in passing, Ava was discharged from speech therapy at the end of the school year. I was fine with that. She had achieved all of her goals working on specific age-appropriate sound targets. We finally got the /k/ and /g/ sounds even at the conversational level and the only sounds she makes errors with at the word level aren't eligible for therapy until she's much older. Besides, we were beginning homeschooling, and as a SLP myself, I'd rather do therapy here at home from here on out. I've taken a more laid back approach with Ava at home. Once she started making progress and her intelligibility was no longer an issue, I decided to let structured therapy happen with her therapists and let her time at home with Mama just be Mama time. And it has been fine. She's doing so well. Most people can understand her most of the time. You would no longer pick her out from a crowd of her peers and notice her speech. All of these things are wonderf...

We found some old home videos tucked away in a folder we had lost track of. Ava was about 4-5 months old when the videos were taken. What struck me as I watched was how smiley she was. I remember very few smiles, and yet while watching these videos, she responded with a huge toothless grin every time I smiled at her. Her eyes would light up and there was this huge smile. And yet she was wrapped in a huge bubble of silence. I listen to babies coo and babble all the time. I play with those sounds in waiting rooms, babbling back and forth with any infant who will play the game with me. Ava was silent. It's a little creepy - all the talking around her and this completely silent little baby. She didn't seem unhappy, she was just silent. She was silent in the bouncer, on the playmat, and in the arms of loved ones. We have some videos of me trying to make her laugh - tossing her gently in the air or creeping tickle fingers up her leg towards her neck. The vast majority of...

Ava is now four years old. She is such an independent spirit. She prefers to do things for herself and to make her own choices. Ava likes to choose her own clothes and I let her (assuming they are clean and seasonally appropriate). If she chooses to wear the same favorite dress to school every day of the week - so be it. If the dress, leggings, socks, and shoes are all different colors and patterns- so be it. Making your own choices is awesome and she shouldn't miss out just because she's little and her fashion sense is still developing. And yet, for all her independence, somehow that doesn't stop her from wanting to be close to people at the same time. Ava is not a loner. She wants to be near her loved ones and engaged in conversation. She doesn't hear the siren call of the computer or a game on a phone the way the rest of the family does. Ava would just as soon walk away from the electronics and engage someone in conversation, a snuggle, a tickle, or a game...

Birthdays, holidays, trips, surgeries, and reduced childcare have been conspiring to decimate my previously immaculate record of regular posting. Bear with me please, I'm working on it. We just had Ava's second IEP meeting. She's come such a long way. (Brief review for those who aren't caught up. We began almost exactly two years ago with her early intervention evaluation . At that time she was barely talking at all even though she was almost two years old. Even more concerning was that she only had a few speech sounds she could make and she couldn't imitate. She was also giving up - beginning to turn to rudimentary gestures instead of even trying to talk. Over the next several months we started using communication boards and sign language which gave her some tools to communicate and made her much happier. She began receiving services and working with me intensively at home. We all worked hard, and we saw a great deal of progress. She learned new sounds ...

Speaking of non-hallmark milestones , we had another one. Doesn't everyone look forward to the first time their young child almost gets run over by a minivan? We were leaving speech. I've taught the children to wait until I open the minivan doors (via a button on my key fob) and then walk on the line to their door. This keeps them safe because I don't open their doors until I'm sure the way is clear. Walking the line keeps them close to the car just in case. Ava completely abandoned both of my safety checks. The children were racing along the sidewalk to see who could get to the van first. The cars were parked perpendicular to the sidewalk. Ava just ran right into the empty parking spot on her side of the van. She didn't walk the line. She didn't wait for me to open the door. And, of course , there was a minivan pulling in to that empty (except for the body of my small child) parking spot. I screamed, but I would have absolutely been too late. Thankf...

I've experimented with several approaches to home therapy. We've done 30 minutes sessions five times a week in addition to the therapy services Ava was receiving elsewhere. That was intense and a schedule that was hard to maintain even when the children were only in daycare two mornings a week. We tried doing a 15-20 minute therapy session nightly after dinner. That was working well at least 3 days a week until summertime hit and our schedule was less regular. Then sessions dropped to once a week and then we got distracted all together. When fall approached, Ava was switching from daycare two mornings a week to preschool five mornings a week. She was also starting her speech group again twice a week for 45 minutes after the summer break. I decided to postpone home sessions until we settled into our school-year schedule. Things are finally calming down. Ava has transitioned well to preschool. She's doing fine in her speech group twice a week. Her speech group is w...

As you may remember, Michael walked around for a couple of weeks with a cough. He never ran a fever or had a runny nose, so I figured he has some sort of mild cold that would work itself out. Eventually it got to the point that he couldn't play because every time he tried to run he'd start coughing uncontrollably. After two weeks of a cough I decided a visit to the pediatrician was in order. Diagnosis: Walking Pneumonia. A week or two later (last Friday), Ava started running a 102 something fever. Her appetite was non-existent and she was a little more tired than usual, but there were no other obvious signs of illness. Michael hadn't been showing symptoms for well over a week, so I thought it was more likely that Ava had picked something up at school than that she'd come down with his pneumonia. I decided to wait it out assuming it was a cold or virus. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday passed in a very similar manner with fever, fatigue, and lack of appetite. Monday...

My daughter has reached the age where she feels it is critically important to correct me all the time. Let's take some recent examples. Me: Ava is three years old. Ava: You mean three and a half, Mama. Me: Let's put on your shorts. Ava: You mean skirt, Mama. Me: That's a lovely path you colored. Ava: You mean arrow path, Mama. My husband was taking a home video of Ava. They were discussing some coloring she had done in her coloring book. At one point, he corrected something she had said. She looked up from her coloring book and gave him a top class evil eye. "Turnaround is such fun," I thought when he showed me the video. I'm so glad he caught that on tape. When's she's giving us the well-practiced version of that look at 16 I'll be able to refer to how she was practicing it at three. And I'll be able to pull out the video to prove it.

About a year ago I pulled a bunch of speech samples from home videos and posted them on the website. A lot of people had trouble making the audio links work so I'm reposting them now in a single post for anyone who is interested in hearing what Ava sounded like just before starting therapy and through the first few months of progress. These samples begin with a short video taken at 21 months of age just before she started therapy. There is a monthly audio sample between 21-26 months and then a final sample at 30 months. Let's begin with a frame of reference for this age group. Even dated research used a cutoff criteria of not having a spoken vocabulary of at least 50 words by the age of two to qualify children as "late talkers". More current research shows that the average number of words girls produce at 24 months is 346 and boys produce 252. A vocabulary of below 92 for girls and 63 for boys puts a 24 month old at the 10th percentile. This is one speech delay...

I've been having fun fixing Ava's hair for school. I bribe her to sit still with a little tv in the morning and we end up with a cute hair style that will last through nap and still look nice in the evening. It also keeps the hair back off her face. She has very fine, thin hair though, and so finding hairstyles that will work has been challenging. Did you know there are entire blogs devoted to little girl hairstyles ? I found one that has hairstyles that work for Ava and I've been doing a different one each day to try them out. I don't always get a picture, but here are a few we've tried since school started a couple of weeks ago. _______________________ Welcome to September and enjoy your holiday weekend!

Let's take some snapshots. Ava just shy of two years old. No words. Three consonants and one vowel in her phonemic inventory. Not able to imitate. History of reduced babbling. Lots of red flags for Childhood Apraxia of Speech. Ava at three. Decent phonetic inventory. Speaking in multi-word sentences. Significantly reduced intelligibility. Exhibiting many age inappropriate phonological processes. Diagnosis would look a lot like a phonological processing disorder with a motor-planning (apraxic) component. Ava at 3 1/2. Intelligibility is improving. Many phonological processes are resolving - even the ones that are still age appropriate (cluster reduction, stopping of stridents, etc.). It would be difficult to describe Ava's speech problems as a phonological processing disorder at this point. She has numerous speech errors which are resistant to intervention due to the underlying motor planning component (stubborn, stubborn velars). Same kid. Same neurology. The ...