Sunday, August 28, 2011

The Strong Not-So-Silent Type

Thanks to the wonder of the internet and its networking, I have been blessed to be in a circle of parents who are weathering the ups and downs of raising kids together.  Many of these parents are women who I know from various points in my life.  Some of them I haven’t seen in over 20 years, but the sounding board and advice seeking nature of Facebook allows us to help each other even when we sometimes don’t know there’s someone out there who can help us.  I truly believe that God uses our technological developments to intersect our lives when they need to be intersected.  Such an intersection happened to me in the past couple of months that has been a true blessing.

I’ve posted on this blog a couple of times about my concern regarding Nola’s slow speech development.  I even talked about her evaluation this summer.  We had just finished the evaluation and I was pretty sure that therapy was the next step on our journey when one of my sorority sisters read my evaluation post and contacted me to tell me that she might have someone who could give me some advice.  Her mom works on a multidisciplinary team that evaluates kids from birth to three.  Emily said that she had mentioned our situation to her mom and her co-workers at a dinner party and they offered to see her.  I was absolutely blown away by her thoughtfulness to bring up our situation and by their willingness to help.  At the time, I thought we were on a pretty straight path, so I told Emily that I wanted to give therapy a shot for a little while and see what happened, but that if we didn’t see expected progress pretty quickly that I would get back with her.  As things turned out, we didn’t end up qualifying for therapy outright and I made the decision to wait. 

One night at dinner, I did a little evaluating of my own and realized that Nola doesn’t make some of the vowel sounds that she should.  My SLP intuition combined with my maternal instinct just kept nagging at me.  I completely and totally trusted the evaluation results that I got at Imagine.  The SLP who evaluated her was great and I didn’t doubt her findings at all.  But…I had the opportunity to have Nola seen by someone who truly specializes in the 0-3 population and could tell me if she needed to be assessed in other areas to encourage her speech development.  I mentioned it to Rudy and we agreed that I needed to contact Emily.  I did and she put me in contact with her mom.  (I’m not giving names or specifics because these kind and wonderful women did this service for me out of the generosity of their hearts and did not charge me anything to do it.  As much as I’d like to shout my appreciation from the rooftops, I certainly don’t want to get them in any kind of trouble.)

When I was on the phone with her, she asked me a lot of questions and I gave her a brief run-down of Nola’s situation and history with her ears, etc.  She told me that she and the SLP on the team were going to be in Northwest Arkansas on Wednesday (8/24) and that they would visit with me and meet Nola that morning.  I didn’t even hesitate.  I took a half day off work and made plans to be there.  It turned out that Emily’s mom didn’t get to come due to change of circumstance, but the SLP did come and we spent almost an hour with her.

Of course, Nola clammed up when we got in the room with a stranger and didn’t do much talking.  Fortunately, I had thought to shoot a little video that morning while we were eating breakfast so that the SLP would be able to see her real communication skills.  Unfortunately, there wasn’t a whole lot to that either because she was so focused on eating her grapes.  But – she did talk a little bit and because I’m a pretty reliable and informed reporter, we were able to work through it. 

The conclusion was exactly what I hoped for.  More than likely, Nola’s chronic ear troubles are at the root of the speech delay, which is pretty minor.  She has lots of word approximations – just not a lot of sounds in them.  If we can keep her ears dry this year (wouldn’t THAT be a miracle in itself?), she’ll likely be able to catch up.  (She does have a cough/cold (lingering now for over 2 weeks!), but so far no ear drainage.)  Our goal is to have her caught up within 6 months – by the time she’s 2.  If not, I’m supposed to contact the SLP again. 

Here’s the funny part:  I’m supposed to stop telling her to “say” things.  How hard is that for an SLP???  I’m supposed to continue to provide a language-rich environment (which we do naturally), but not try to make her talk.  I am supposed to accept her approximations and attempts, build on them and respond appropriately (which I do naturally).  I just can’t use the word, “say” (as in, “say more” or “say please” or “say up”).  The hardest part is stopping myself from trying to get her to say things that she’s said before that I thought were cute or surprisingly well-articulated (as in, “say hey you guys”). 

Why can’t I try to get her to say stuff?  Well…it seems that Nola is a bit of strong-willed girl.  She’s pretty much only going to say what she wants to say and doesn’t really care if it impresses me that she says what I want her to say.  What we’ve noticed in the last couple of weeks is that if she does something new and we make a big deal out of it, she usually gets mad.  (For instance, her daycare teacher told her she was “shakin’ it” and Nola stopped dancing, through herself on the ground and scowled/glared at the teacher.  Attitude much???)  So, if we hear her say something cute like “hey you guys” or “oh, man” or “lemonade” and then ask her to repeat it, she might not ever say it again…just because we want her to.  For just that reason, she’s not a very good candidate for therapy at this point.  I see a LOT of reverse psychology in our future.

Since the evaluation on Wednesday, I’ve heard lots and lots of words.  Just by accepting her approximations, I think she feels more free to try to talk.  She’s imitating more words and then sometimes using them again.  The greatest thing I’ve seen lately is that she’s starting to try to sing.  This morning, she was trying to sing itsy-bitsy spider.  I couldn’t tell what she was saying or pick up the tune, but I knew she was singing and I figured it out by the hand motions.  It was awesome.  She also does “no more monkeys jumping on the bed” complete with shaking her finger.  Her dancing has gotten hilarious, though we (of course) would never mention it to her!  She shakes those hips back and forth like nobody’s business! 

So, my mind is at ease.  We’ll do what we know will help her.  We’ll continue on our path and watch those ears very closely.  I’ll pray that she catches up quickly, but know that we have a plan if she doesn’t and I’ll trust that God has a plan bigger than mine for this little pigtailed cutie:

nola pigtails

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