...I would argue that it is sometimes the pain in things that make you appreciate them the most... it is my unconditional willingness to endure the middle-of-the-night feedings, the cleaning up of vomit, the screaming for no good reason, etc that makes me realize how much I love my child and love raising him...

Monday, October 7, 2013

Speech Eval

It was before my dry spell that I brought my concerns about Zach's speech to these boards. Sorry for the dry spell. I can only do what I can do (or enter some other philosophical jargon here).
 
Well, back to the speech. It improved but not to a level I was comfortable with. So after much debate, we decided to get his speech evaluated.
 
This was a hard decision for two reasons:
1. Zach is very speech shy around new people. While he will hug them and play with them, he won't usually verbalize around people he isn't used to.

2. I don't want to be a parent that pushes my child to do things on my (or a book with a milestone chart) schedule. I want my child to develop at the pace he is comfortable with (as long as it isn’t so far off that I am being neglectful by not addressing the lag).
 
It was very difficult to get a beat on what exactly was really behind for his age. I couldn’t find anything that even explained a normal speech development pattern. I wanted to know whether he was following a normal speech development trajectory or whether he was way off. I couldn’t find it.
 
I talked to several professionals that weren’t concerned about his speech for his age. But it just kept nagging. We got a (great!) referral and went in for the evaluation.
 
The process lasted approximately 2 hours. The evaluator was very casual and sweet with Zach. The initial tests had to do with Zach’s understanding of language. They sat at a children’s table and started with Zach just playing with a few items: cup, keys, blocks. After Zach explored the items for a bit, the evaluator started asking him to hand things to her. Over the test, the evaluator would periodically switch between having Zach work with actual items (rubber duck, plastic bear, shoe box, etc) and pictures in a book. It started with simple identification and moved to more complicated things like action words and descriptor words.
 
The entire time she was working with him, the evaluator would make note of words and sounds Zach would say in response to her requests for items. She would periodically turn to Matt or I and  ask if he normally says certain words that seemed to be escaping him at the time. She was very good about being able to identify when Zach just didn’t know words vs he was just being a two year old and not participating at that moment.
 
After a while, she moved more toward getting Zach to talk to her. She would ask him to do multistep tasks and use words as he did them. I have to say, Zach blew Matt and I away. He did and said things that we wouldn’t think he could have. The evaluator really seemed to know how to pull the words and actions out of him.
 
Eventually, of course, he tired of the environment and the tests. That’s when the evaluator pulled out the bubbles and Zach was back in the game. He was an amazing boy the entire time. I was so proud of him and hugely impressed with the evaluator.
 
At the end of the session, the evaluator asked that we play with Zach to see if she could hear words she hadn’t heard before. He was really pretty tired at that point and wasn’t really into it. She then asked him to eat a cracker and drink some water and watched how he chewed and swallowed and then asked to look at his tongue.
 
In the end the results were great and Zach’s speech is right where it needs to be. As usual, I expected too much. Shocker. At least I identify this and TRY to combat it. It all comes out of love for my little man.

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