Excited! Language delay improving

Kari

Juliet is finally stringing two-word phrases together! She just started in the past few days with phrases like "two balls," "my boo-boo," "Justin's spoon," and "mama's smoothie." She's limited to an adjective and a noun, but hopefully she'll start adding in some verbs soon. She'll be 2.5 on Saturday, so it's taken a while, but she's finally learning lots of new words and trying to string them together.

I had her evaluated by a speech therapist when she just turned 2 and they said she was behind but had hopes that she would catch up by the time she was 3. It'll be nice when she learns more because she gets so frustrated when she can't be understood. Her pronunciation is still pretty poor; you really have to know her speech and listen to the context to figure things out, if you can at all. But, I feel like this is a cognitive jump from where we were a few weeks ago!!

K&H

That's great!! Way to go Juliet!

coryandamanda

That is great! I know all too well how frustrating it can be for both the child and parent when there are speech issues. M is still very hard to understand and he turns 3 in 2 months. His vocabulary seems to be pretty large and he is wicked smart but his pronunciation/annunciation is bad. He also has this new thing with adding numbers and counting into his sentences for some odd reason so that hasn't helped! He came upstairs last night with a pajama shirt in his hand and said, "2 wirt accident 3, 4, 5, 6." What that translated into is that he accidentally brought downstairs 2 pajama shirts instead of a shirt and pants so he needed to put the shirt away and get pants. I think I will seek out employment as a toddler translator after dealing with this for a few years because I have become an expert. LOL

Kari

Unfortunately, in my state, Juliet has to score a standard deviation of -1.5 in two areas, or -2.0 in speech alone to qualify for free services that come to her location. She scored a -0.6 in speech and was close to normal in the other areas they tested. (Ironically she was a rock star the day they came and evaluated her, and had never before nor ever since been that clear or concise with her language.) Basically you can only get services around here if you have Down's Syndrome, ASD, or an equally equivalent issue.

I can choose to go the medical route and have my insurance pick up speech therapy, but that means I have to get her there and back (about 30 minutes from our house and 60 minutes from my work) and foot a co-pay cost for every visit. As a single, working parent, I just can't swing it. So, we wait and hope it improves.

ETA: This morning I took Juliet to an appointment with me. She babbled for about two minutes with the nurse practitioner, and during that entire time not one clear word was spoken. That's where her language is at most days. Then we came home and she very clearly said, "Let's swim!" I told her no, that it was lunchtime, and she went and grabbed a swim diaper and brought it to me because she assumed she wasn't understood.