A Profound Entry

My boy is smart - wicked smart, to be exact. He's two years and 4 months old and is constantly amazing me with what he knows. He can recognize and count numbers up to 50. He knows his alphabet and if you put down flashcards of the alphabet that are mixed up, he will pick them up in order. He is always singing the abc's or counting something. Yesterday, we found out that he can match the lowercase alphabet letters with the upper case partners.

But, there's one this he can't do (yet) and that's talk. This comes as no surprise. I've been dealing with it for a long time. First I kept insisting that he couldn't hear and it was hinted that I was overreacting. But we were able to go see a specialist and have a hearing test done and low and behold, he couldn't hear. He had t-tubes put in in April and we've had his hearing re-tested and so we were raring to go.

His speech had definitely picked up since April, but he still actually only had one true spoken word - "mom." Not once have I ever been called mommy. He has a huge vocabulary and language bank, but not the needed sounds to make the words. For example: ba for ball, na for banana, ee for cheese, etc. It is only ever one syllable and one sound.

So, I knew it was bad. Yes, he's a boy and yes, he's young, but I was concerned that his hearing impairment when he was younger had really messed things up. We went for a follow up to the specialist, and after seeing my little man work with numbers and flashcards, she too was impressed and said, "we need to get this boy talking!" We were given a referrel to speech at BTHC, but were told the waiting list was 6 months.

So, I talked to a speech and language pathologist and arranged for private speech. She assessed him and as she handed me the report, she warned me that it sounded worse than it was and not to be upset.

Ack. I knew there was a problem, obviously, as I was the one insisting he see specialists and getting hearing tests and asking for speech, but there's just something so heart-wrenching to read the words in black and white. He was placed "in the "profound" category of phonological impairment in comparison to other children with disordered expressive phonological systems." Ack. (And yes, I did cry when I read the report - I'm a wuss like that.)

Out of 14 categories, he basically flunked 9 of them. The summary said, "Based on test results, G's articulation/phonological skills were found to be significantly below the average range for a child his age. He was found to have a profound phonological delay."

Ah yes, but the good thing is the 2 year old brain is a sponge and he just LOVES soaking up learning. He sits sooo attentively and tries so hard and we have already seen so much progress. I can't wait to hear him in a few months!

Wow. That was a really long post.