DBW Makes Things

This blog is still in its infancy, and I haven’t solidified the direction I want to take it yet. Home renovation, design, crafts, personal? Yes. I am fine with all of those topics. One topic I never really wanted to explore was mommy blogging. I love my kids, but I want to respect their privacy. If I am not compelling enough to garner readers on my own, I figure it’s not my kids’ jobs to lure them in for me.

Now let me be a hypocrite. I want to talk about OB’s speech problems. I have hemmed and hawed about publicly discussing this. A few months ago, I wrote a post about his speech delay and our experience with speech therapy, but I ended up deleting it. Part of the reason I deleted the post was because he had made such good progress in therapy that he was dismissed from speech. The post about his speech struggles and the difficulties we faced as his parents made his dismissal from therapy feel like a non sequitur. Due to recent changes, it looks like OB will need continued therapy.

Let’s get caught up to speed on the speech front: OB was a late talker. He wasn’t just delayed; he didn’t follow the normal progression of speech development. He exhibited minimal cooing, babbling, or gesturing. He didn’t exhibit typical oral development either- he had difficulty latching on; had little drooling (even during teethting); had an inability to mimic facial expressions, to stick his tongue out, to pucker his lips for a kiss, or to blow (bubbles, birthday candles, whatever). After reading that list, it seems really obvious that there was something wrong, but it was so hard to tell. For all the things he couldn’t do, he was progressing so normally, quickly even, in other areas. He had fantastic gross and fine motor coordination. He had amazing receptive language skills and could understand multi-step directions at a young age. At a year and a half, he could identify (by pointing) all of his uppercase letters, numbers through ten, and colors. He was loving and social. Yet, he didn’t always make eye contact and, although his hearing was normal, he acted like he couldn’t hear us when we called his name.

Scary, right? Plug some of that into a search engine and I think you know what pops up most often: autism. Here’s where being a special education teacher really helped me out when the internet got scary- I just knew he didn’t have autism. I have worked with so many students on the spectrum, and I just knew. It wasn’t crazy parental denial, I swear. Still, I did ask his pediatrician for her opinion. She was with me on that one.

OB started working with a phenomenal speech and language pathologist named Amy shortly before his second birthday. Initially he saw Amy one hour a week in our home (in-home therapy is provided through state early intervention services if insurance won’t pay; ours wouldn’t). He didn’t have a diagnosis for a while; he was treated under the umbrella term of expressive language delay. Eventually, Amy felt comfortable offering a diagnosis of verbal apraxia. Apraxia is another umbrella term, but slightly less vague. Plus a diagnosis can mean insurance coverage when early intervention services end at age three.

We never had to battle our insurance to see if they would pay for OB’s therapy because he was dismissed from speech therapy just before his third birthday. His receptive language was very high while expressive language and articulation were on the low-normal end. We knew that he might need further articulation assistance in the future, but we thought it could be addressed when he started school.

We thought we had a happy ending. I mean, we did. Our son went from being a two-year-old non-talker to someone who could express his needs, make jokes, tell us he loves us, and call me ‘Mommy’ (he couldn’t articulate the /m/ sound before therapy). It’s just that what we thought was the ending to his speech struggles was just a temporary break. OB has been out of therapy for three months now, and over Christmas break, we noticed that his occasional disfluency (stutter) that had been present during therapy was getting more frequent and more pronounced. We talked about our options at the time, and we decided to wait it out. OB has strong pre-reading skills and great social skills. If it was not affecting him, we decided to see if it would go away on it’s own. In the past week, however, we’ve noticed that he has begun to get frustrated when he gets hung up on a word. He has resorted to using gestures and grunts to convey meaning. His pre-school teacher said he got so frustrated at school that he threw a toy. It might go away on its own, but I don’t know that we can bear to watch him struggle in the mean time. From what I’ve read, therapy for disfluency may not be effective (there aren’t enough studies comparing reslts from therapeutic interventions to no intervention for disfluency during pre-school years). Most disfluencies go away whether through therapy or not. There’s no evidence to suggest that therapy causes disfluency to continue (that I’ve read), so we’ve re-evaluated and have decided to go the therapy route.

I know that in the bigger scheme of things, OB’s speech issues are not the worst thing we could be dealing with as parents or the most difficult disability for a child to have. I am thankful for everything OB can do and for everything that is not a struggle for him. Still, it is heartbreaking to watch your child struggle to do something that comes so easily for most of us. This became particularly evident as I have watched NB follow a typical speech development pattern. There isn’t anything Alex and I wouldn’t do to help OB struggle a little less.

Just look at this guy!