We had a speech and language evaluation done for our little Janers last week. Jane has excellent receptive language--she understands so much and remembers EVERYTHING! Jane is also a really good communicator using baby sign. She has over 50 signs (I stopped keeping track) and uses them to ask for things, point out objects in books, answer questions, show us things she sees in her environment, and tell us stories from her day (or stories of things she remembers...even things from early June...as I said, Jane remembers everything!). Recently, Jane even started using 2-3 sign phrases! As excellent as baby sign has been for Jane, we are concerned that may have contributed to a delay in Jane's spoken language. Jane doesn't have very many words or even speech sounds. We've tried to encourage her to vocalize when signing but Jane just doesn't have the sounds to approximate words. She also doesn't seem to have an interest in imitating our sounds or words.
We shared these concerns with our pediatrician at Jane's 18 month well baby check. I expected that she would tell us to give her time, but she actually referred us to have a speech and language evaluation done.
The results came back as we expected. Jane's receptive language is above average (1 whole standard deviation above the mean!). The speech pathologist described Jane's expressive language (sign language doesn't count) as "slightly below average" but her test scores showed that she was 1 whole standard deviation below the mean, which to me means slightly delayed (not "slightly below average"). Our options were to start weekly speech therapy or reevaluate in 3 months. But 3 months is too close to the holidays, moving, and baby. And in three months she could be even further delayed, especially since she has no interest in trying to imitate our speech sounds or words. She's supposed to have 300 words by the time she's 2 and she only has 2. Our little cave baby! She gets by on grunts and sign, so I guess she doesn't have much need for talking.
Her first speech session was today and it did not go very well. She bit her lip right when her name was called and was very upset. She wanted to nurse, but the therapist told her she couldn't. So that was a bad start. And the therapist was really loud and in Jane's face, which didn't sit to well with our shy girl. Jane was so frustrated and stressed during the 50 min session. She wanted only wanted to play with mom (not surprising, my little mama's girl). The therapist was withholding toys from Jane, trying to get her to talk. Jane was asking for the toys using sign (e.g., balls) and pointing to herself rather forcefully (as if to say, "HELLO LADY, I WANT THE BALL!") and was really frustrated when that didn't get her what she wanted. Jane didn't understand that she needed to attempt to say "ball" in order to get the ball. There were lots of tears and meltdowns from our poor frustrated girl. It was so hard to watch! I think Jane really needs these services, but I'm not so sure about the therapist. The therapist that did our evaluation may be a better fit. We'll give it a couple more weeks and see.
Her first speech session was today and it did not go very well. She bit her lip right when her name was called and was very upset. She wanted to nurse, but the therapist told her she couldn't. So that was a bad start. And the therapist was really loud and in Jane's face, which didn't sit to well with our shy girl. Jane was so frustrated and stressed during the 50 min session. She wanted only wanted to play with mom (not surprising, my little mama's girl). The therapist was withholding toys from Jane, trying to get her to talk. Jane was asking for the toys using sign (e.g., balls) and pointing to herself rather forcefully (as if to say, "HELLO LADY, I WANT THE BALL!") and was really frustrated when that didn't get her what she wanted. Jane didn't understand that she needed to attempt to say "ball" in order to get the ball. There were lots of tears and meltdowns from our poor frustrated girl. It was so hard to watch! I think Jane really needs these services, but I'm not so sure about the therapist. The therapist that did our evaluation may be a better fit. We'll give it a couple more weeks and see.
By the way, I'm really not sure what's going on with the light behind the text. I didn't want to retype all of this, so hopefully the highlighting isn't too visually distracting.
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