expressive language, yeah that’s a good name for it

Mar 03

Posted by: Scott in: blog, caleb isaiah, current events, family, me myself and i, memories, parenting, ramblings

Caleb has been getting speech therapy for about fourteen months now. I’ve mentioned before that he waited until about a month after his second birthday to talk. In the back of my head, I knew he’d talk when he was ready, but I figured if there was a problem, why waste valuable time that we could have been working with him. He did not have to be re-evaluated at any time for this program, which runs from age one to age three. At 21 months, he easily qualified based on a 30% delay to receive therapy, since he was completely silent at that point. So even when he began talking and clearly sailed up to “normal” speech, we just continued the therapy because of course it isn’t “bad” for him. It gave me a free hour once or twice a week. It gave him some interaction with someone else, different experiences, etc.

His therapist spent the last two sessions doing end of therapy testing to see where we now stand. She explained that a score of 100 would place him average with other children exactly his age. 90 being the slightly behind but still average end, and 110 being the slightly advanced end of the normal range. For his vocabulary, listening and expressive language, he scored in the mid to upper 120s! She said his vocabulary number, which was 127, fell in the normal range for a 4.5 year old!! His expressive language and listening were 3 years, 5 months and 3 years, 7 months respectively (I think). His pronunciation fell right on target at 102, meaning 3 years, 2 months. She tested him on a variety of words with all different sounds at the beginning, middle, and end. Of course he still has that cute toddler substitution of “W” for “L” and “D” for “T” (I wike dis, Wook at dis). Just let me enjoy it while I can lady, I’m already weepy enough over the third birthday thing!

So it was kind of neat to see standardized testing equivalents to where he falls on a scale compared to other kids his age. This is the same therapist that just acted shocked when I said I wasn’t interested in proceeding with testing to see if he would qualify for school system therapies. I knew he wouldn’t qualify. It would have been a waste of everyone’s time. I was so proud of my big boy. Not only because of the results, but because we explained that we had to have a big person talk when the therapist got here this morning, and he sat quiet as a church mouse and listened to the entire conversation!! Nearly an hour! He could have gotten up to go play, but I think he got the idea that he was required to sit there. He was a little whimpery, but it made it much easier to talk without him slamming toys together and such. He was such an angel!

In reality though, this kid takes a deep breath when he wakes up, and talks ALL-DAY-LONG. He is in the stage where he…umm…feels the need to announce all bodily functions. We were sitting in KFC the other night and he looks up with that twinkle in his eye…”I POOTED Mommy! I pooted!” Mkay that’s wonderful! “What do you say?” I asked. “Excuse me, I POOTED!” Repeat for the next five minutes. This morning while Kim (his speech therapist) was here, he let one rip on Dad’s leg. They looked at each other grinning, because that’s just what men do. It’s like an alternate form of communication for them you know. I started laughing too, and Kim had clearly missed the joke. She was like “What? What did he say?” It dawned on her about the time Caleb leaned to one side and pointed to his butt.

Yep, he’s all ours! We sure are proud of em!

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