Talking About Speech

Joe is taking a turn on Alyssa's new Barbie laptop, and says: "I want it back to Ing-goo-wish!!!" (English... he'd accidentally switched it to French).

"Ing-goo-wish" How cute.

They both held off on speech until they were two. (Now I can't shut them up ;-) For A it was eerie silence - she'd look at you (through you!) but not make any sound. My doc thought she had hearing issues and sent her for a test, which she passed with flying colours. She just didn't want to talk. (so there).

In J's case, he grunted. He communicated verbally with nothing but grunts, until a few days before his second birthday. Then all of a sudden one morning he started picking up lettered blocks and naming them (oh my!!!). He had a name for all 26 - sometimes he called them by the letter names, and sometimes by the sounds they make. It was a happy day for Mommy.

A's venture into speech wasn't nearly as dramatic. My Doc sent us to a Hanen workshop, where we applied for a program. There were limited spaces and A was younger than most of the kids (as in, they needed help faster), so we didn't make the cut. Instead we got four private sessions with a speech pathologist for the Hanen It Takes Two To Talk program.

I was never really worried about A, 'cause I knew she could hear and I knew she was smart, but I was still tickled when after two weeks she'd gone from no words at all to about 30, and then two weeks after that she was starting to string words together into short sentences.

Now she's almost six and her brother is four, and our house is filled with the sweet sound of little yammering voices from dawn until dusk.

Yammering voices. Dawn until dusk. (sigh) lol