Raincity Mama

We’ve started tak­ing Dude to weekly speech ther­apy ses­sions, and today was his sec­ond ses­sion. At 2 1/2 years old he can say two words that a stranger would rec­og­nize. There are a cou­ple of other words that he’ll try but I think I’m the only one that can under­stand what he’s try­ing to say. For the rest he signs and when signs fail he points and grunts. He can prob­a­bly sign over 200 signs but that only works when the per­son he is sign­ing to knows ASL, which isn’t that many peo­ple. It is espe­cially hard to see him out try­ing to inter­act with other kids his age and they don’t under­stand him.

The speech ther­a­pist seems to under­stand him and his sit­u­a­tion a bit bet­ter. He is one of the youngest patients she’s worked with so she’s hav­ing to adapt her method. I was reluc­tant when we first met her months ago because she was rec­om­mend­ing that I stop teach­ing him signs. I didn’t see why I would take his only form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion away from him. I still don’t want to take it away. It is just eas­ier to sign because he will read­ily use signs to tell me what he wants but if I attempt to get him to speak then we go around and around with him point­ing to var­i­ous things and he gets upset when I don’t know what he wants.

As part of my home­work with him I’m to try to get him to use his voice more often and to do that we are going to basic sounds, like mmm, dd, bb, ah, oh, eh, etc. If I start he will copy me as long as his sis­ter doesn’t jump in. If I ask him what a dog sounds like and his sis­ter answers he just doesn’t see the point in answer­ing too. I totally get that but I just want to hear Dude try. This is one of the chal­lenges of hav­ing twins. It is really high­lighted when one if advanced and the other one is delayed. At least they aren’t iden­ti­cal because it would be even more tempt­ing to make comparisons.

Because I knew that we were going to start up speech ther­apy again I started ramp­ing up prac­tic­ing with him. The hus­band and I have also made it a pri­or­ity to give the kids one on one time with us at least once a week. It sounds so piti­ful to see that in writ­ing that they only get indi­vid­u­al­ized atten­tion once a week but I guess all par­ents with more than one kids strug­gle with that.

Mama and Dada are the two words that Dude says that I think any stranger would rec­og­nize. For the longest time he would only say them when I prompted him to use his voice. The hus­band would be upstairs and Dude would stand at the bot­tom gate sign­ing Dad and “call­ing” him in a word­less way. I’d remind him that his daddy couldn’t see him sign­ing and that if he used his voice then daddy would respond. Only then would he call Dada.

The other day I came home and Dude saw me sneak in the door. He ran over with a look of delight on his face as he cried Mama. I can hardly describe the joy I felt hear­ing my son call for me unprompted.

We sat today with the speech ther­a­pist and it quickly became obvi­ous that for what­ever rea­son Dude wasn’t inter­ested in play­ing any of her games. She com­mented on how last week he was quite talk­a­tive and it felt like magic and this week, well, not so much.

I’m as on-board with his speech ther­apy as I’m going to get. I am con­cerned about the level of his speech delay. I believe that I am doing the best thing by tak­ing him for ther­apy. I just know that he will speak when he is good and ready. There are a num­ber of kids that for what­ever rea­son decide that speech just isn’t for them and then one day they just start talk­ing. It will take time. For now he doles out words at a miserly rate. Now that I’ve heard him say my name I know that it will hap­pen; on his terms and that is fine with me.

My son is 21 months old and doesn’t speak. We had his hear­ing checked and it is fine. We’ve gone to the Speech and Lan­guage Pathol­o­gist and she says that his lan­guage acqui­si­tion is fine but he is sig­nif­i­cantly speech delayed. What this means is that he under­stands most of what we say and points and grunts or signs to get what he wants. He does not say “mama”, “dada”, or “Elmo”. His twin sis­ter says all these things and more. When you com­pare how many words they know they are pretty much on par for recep­tive lan­guage. On expres­sive lan­guage he lags behind just a tiny bit only because we are strug­gling to learn signs at a pace that meets his needs.

The SLP doesn’t want me to teach him signs for every­thing. She thinks that by giv­ing him signs for every­thing we are remov­ing the need for him to express him­self orally. She wants me to teach him the spo­ken word for an item and not the sign so that he will need to use the spo­ken word to get what he wants. I feel con­flicted about this. Once we started teach­ing him signs for things like “cracker”, “apple”,“milk”, “book” he had so many fewer tantrums. It was amaz­ing! So many tantrums were just about him not being under­stood and I’m feel­ing resis­tant on not teach­ing him a sign just see if I can “make” him speak.

I am learn­ing that there is very lit­tle value in try­ing to “make” my kids do cer­tain things. I can’t make them sleep or eat and I’m begin­ning to think that mak­ing them speak needs to be added to the list. I could refuse to give him a book to read unless he says “book” but I see that turn­ing into a bat­tle of wills. While I would love to hear him say “more cracker please” I’m con­tent to repeat the signs and speak the words back to him and keep him stocked in crack­ers and see him gig­gle with glee when he sees that I do under­stand him.