optimistic-mother-blog-blog

[optimistic-mother-blog-blog]

A bit of background

Being a mother of two young children all I have wanted for them is to be happy, healthy and to have as easy a journey through life as can be. Unfortunately for my son, the simple task of being able to speak isn’t so simple for him. From the moment Dylan was born we couldn’t wait to hear him talk, we had so many fantasies of the conversations we would have about his likes and dislikes, the inevitable endless ‘why’ questions and all the little quirky things that children say. But when Dylan was a baby he barely even babbled like other babies did. It wasn’t until he was 2 years and 2 months old that we even got ‘mum’ and ‘dad’. We were concerened, all the information states that by 2 years old a child should be able to consistantly say 7 words. And Dylan didn’t. He is now 2 years 9 months and the only words he can say are mum, gad (dad), boove (blue) and een (green). We found it all so strange because he has such a clear understanding of everything we tell him. He takes it in, he can process it all, he can follow instructions and is otherwise a happy and healthy child. He just can’t talk. What’s even more strange is that he does communicate with us, its just that he uses the same noise continuously in a sentance. So ‘love you mum’ becomes ‘uh uuh mum’. And even the words he does use don’t come fluently for him, they sound forced and as if he has to concentrate on them. Again, we were concerned. The first speech therapist we saw was back in June. We were told he was a strange case, she wasn’t really sure what was stopping him from talking, that boys are usually lazy, that it will probably just happen, and he was too young to be able to sit and concentrate on a therapy session, as his young age means that his attention span is limited and we would need to wait until he was closer to 3 years old for him to be seen again. All good and well, but we had no answers and we felt increasing frustrated. We have tortured ourselves with the fact that as parents, we have somehow failed our child by not teaching one of the basic things in life. But we done what the therapist said, we waited, we tried more techniques, increased the amount of stories we read him and tried to hard to teach him more letter sounds. Constantly. And nothing worked and his speech didn’t seem to improve. I take Dylan to a local playgroup for kids aged 2-3 to help improve social skills, which we started in August. I told the playgroup leaders about the fact that Dylan couldn’t yet speak and they assured me that they would do what they could, and I have to say, they have been amazing with him and so understanding and supportive. They asked me to stay behind one morning for a chat about Dylan, telling me that his lack of comunication skills were impacting his social interactions with the other children. Instead of being able to say ‘hey, I’m playing with that, give it back’ like most kids will do when faced with another child taking something from them, Dylan would grab the toy back and would have a tantrum out of sheer frustration. This wasn’t really news to me. I’ve taken him to soft play centres before and had him come to me crying because the other kids run off when he tries to play with them, usually because they can’t understand him. It breaks my heart. I can’t stand to see him upset about something, and I can’t force the children to play with him. He often gets upset and angry when we can’t understand him. The playgroup leaders advised me to ask for Dylan to be seen again, so that’s what we did. We saw a different Speech and Language Therapist 4 days ago now, who took the time to properly assess what Dylan can and can’t say, she listened to me, and how I felt it was impacting Dylans relationships with other children. I felt like she actually took my concerns seriously. After assessing him she told me that she believes Dylan has something called Oral Dyspraxia which basically means he knows what he is trying to say, but the muscles in his mouth just don’t form the words properly. But more on that in another post! She gave us so much advice on how to help Dylan, honestly she was great. We have sound exercises to do which involves making ‘m’ and ‘b’ sounds and adding vowels to them to encourage him to say things like ‘ma’, ‘may’, ‘my’, ‘ba’, ‘bay’, ‘by’ and so on. He can do a small amount of them and gets easily distracted so its hard to properly get him to sit and pay attention, but we do them in short one minute bursts throughout the day so he doesn’t get annoyed. Alongside this we are learning Makaton sign language to help him communicate. I’ll post another time about how that’s going. Right now, we have an informal diagnosis, we have a plan, and we are at the start of a very steep learning curve. I’m sure we will have plenty of tough times ahead, but for now we have an answer and we’re all feeling pretty optimistic.