Smarty's Journey to Speech

Ok, this one’s a doosie. It took me a while to get it all down. That’s why I haven’t posted for a few days. This is a record of all that was involved with Smarty learning to speak. (at least as much as my feeble brain can recall) Sweety is starting his own journey, and I wanted lay out all of our tools in front of us. Here we go.

Smarty awed and cooed like a normal baby until he was about 5 months old. Then he abruptly stopped. This coincided with his first ear infection which lead us all to an obvious conclusion: Can’t hear, can’t talk; he’ll start speaking once his ears clear. Months of ear infections came and went; we had a difficult time getting consent to putting tubes in his ears. We continued to wait for verbal noises of any kind.

By the time Smarty was 8 or 9 months, I was sick of waiting for him to speak. (I’m not very patient, I know.) After a month of work, Smarty signed his first word at 10 months and we took off into sign language. At age 2 his sign vocab swelled to nearly 200 signs before his ability to speak began to pick up. We watched shows like Signing Time. I read books and found great websites like ASLPro.com. He was brilliant at it. (I was not) His first solid piece of communication was the signed word ‘more.’ Then we moved on to easy signs like ‘milk,’ ‘eat,’ ‘drink,’ ‘bath,’ and ‘binky.’

If I didn’t teach him a sign by the time he needed it, he made it up. It was great to see the associations between words that lead to him making up a sign. ‘Water’ and ‘white’ both start the same way so when Smarty needed a sign for ‘white’ he made up a sign that was similar to ‘water.’ Smarty knew the sign for ‘apple,’ so when he needed a sign for ‘red,’ he made one that was similar to ‘apple.’ Elmo is a red sesame street character, and his sign for ‘Elmo’ was also similar to his sign for ‘apple.’ He was crazy patient with us while we learned all of his signs.

Just after Smarty turned 1 year, we finally got tubes in his ears. “At last,” I thought, “all our problems are solved!” (Woops! That was naïve!) Nothing happened with speech, and after a month or so of good health, the ear infections began again. He went on to have tubes reinserted at 18 months, 2 years old, and 3 years old. Finally with this last tubal, (last Feb) he has been ear-ache free for a while. We have reason to hope that we’re pretty much done with that phase.

But let’s get back to speech. At fifteen months our pediatrician gave us one of the most important gifts we have ever received: she sent us to Early Intervention! (insert glowing, golden light and a chorus of heavenly angels here) They are amazing! They offer so much help for very little money. Smarty was given private speech therapy and group therapy as well. That’s also where he received occupational therapy and food therapy for his sensory issues.

His speech therapist started out by doing activities that encouraged simple one-word syllables. She would blow bubbles and say, “Pop!” as she popped the bubbles. She would bang two objects together and say, “Boom!” She played the drop-it-on-the-floor- over-and-over game that babies love so much. Every time he dropped something she said, “uh-oh!” as she picked it up. She also encouraged sign language to give him a full vocabulary.

She had us make picture books filled with people and objects that were important to him. We went through them frequently, and encouraged any repeated verbal response that was linked to any of the pictures. By 18 months he was cooing like a 5 month old again. While he had said ‘Mama’ and ‘Dada’ before, I think some version of those words were really solid in his sounds only vocabulary by then. Shortly after that he gained two more words, ‘more’ and ‘please.’

Once Smarty was attempting different sounds his therapist began playing games that encouraged very simple words. She would play peek-a-boo with an interesting toy and say, ‘in’ and ‘out’ accordingly. (Oh yes, our sessions were soooo stimulating….. zzzzzzzzssghck! [that’s a snore]) Actually it was fun to watch Smarty motivated to work really hard. He was awesome at trying to do all that was asked of him. He still is. We also started using flashcards about this time. Smarty’s therapist would give him a set of words that all had a common sound, but placed in different areas of the word. (beg, middle, end)

The real breakthrough was shortly after Smarty turned two. We went to see a speech pathologist who diagnosed Smarty with Childhood Apraxia of Speech. Not surprisingly, once we found that out, we were able to make huge advancements.

We figured out that because Apraxia made imitation difficult, teaching him how to speak with phonics would be a better way to go. Sure enough, we started showing him letters and associating a sound with the letter and that seamed to help immensely. Vowels were most difficult, but eventually he was able to understand specific instructions about how to shape his mouth and where to put his tongue and so on. As he got good at putting sounds with letters, we grouped the letters together to form words. Essentially we taught him to speak by teaching him watered-down, ulta-basic reading.

I am thrilled and amazed to think how far Smarty has come since then. I wrote a letter a year and a half ago in which I said that we were still encouraging Smarty to make any sounds at all. Last November when Smarty turned three, amid anguish and tears, we said farewell to Early Intervention, and he began attending a developmental preschool. They have continued his therapy beautifully, and he speaks in phrases and short sentences now! He has developed imitation skills, and happily attempts any word sent his way.

We have a ways to go for him to speak on ‘grade level.’ But I don’t even care about that. I just get butterflies every time he says to me, “Mommy, I wuff you!” I’m so grateful every time I have to ask him to be quiet. Sometimes when he sings loudly, and off key, in the middle of Sacrament Meeting, we just let him. It’s so beautiful to me.

Well there you have it. It’s a relief to get all of this out of my head and onto a more permanent record, (yes I did just admit that my brain is a less than permanent record!) especially as we are starting down this road with Sweety. So if any of you, that are still actually reading, have participated in this journey and can remember other things we did that were helpful or milestones we crossed, please, comment and add your recollections to this record. (including you, Honey Ben)

Now, thank you for politely reading this bible-length post, but for heaven’s sake! Get up and stretch your muscles!