speech evaluation

I took Alex for a speech evaluation.  We knew after the 15 month well visit that the pediatrician was concerned about a possible delay in speech development in both Jakob and Alex.  But the greatest concern was with Alex.  And the pediatrician did not change his tune when we took the boys for their 18 month well visit.  And so I agreed to get a speech evaluation done.  I was still not overly concerned about a speech delay in Alex at this most recent well visit appointment.  But I knew my only regret could ever possibly be not taking advantage of the resources available to us should we learn down the road that there was an issue and Alex would have benefited from the early intervention.  The speech-language pathologist that we met with did a really good job with Alex.  The evaluation basically consisted of Alex playing with different toys and interacting with the speech pathologist.  So of course he had a blast.  The speech pathologist also asked me a lot of different questions.  And in the end I was not surprised by the results.  Alex is moderately delayed in expressive language or "talking".  The speech pathologist was actually really impressed with how well Alex could communicate despite his lack of babbling and words.  My boy can grunt with the best of them!  The speech pathologist gave us a bunch of different options.  We have decided to start Alex in a weekly 30 minute 1:1 speech therapy session.  The speech pathologist is not overly concerned with the exception of the lack of babbling from Alex.  So we want to work on developing some of his mouth muscles and hopefully get him babbling a bit more.  They aren't even really concerned with actual words at this point.  Because these therapy sessions are not covered by health insurance they are going to run us $71 a week.  Joy!  But Kara and I have talked at length and we actually think this is really important for Alex at the moment.  But you better believe we will be watching with a keen eye as this is not a cheap route.  We have also been referred to our local early intervention program.  We are hoping we can supplement some of the "paid" speech therapy sessions with visits from the early intervention program.  We shall see.  We are not even certain Alex would qualify for the services.  The speech therapy is as much for Kara and myself as it is for Alex.  We already walked away with good pointers after the speech evaluation.  The speech therapist though that signing would be really beneficial to Alex.  And because of his great receptive language skills the speech therapist thought Alex would pick up signs really fast.  And by golly did I shed a tear tonight when Alex learned to sign "more" in just a few minutes!  We were eating chips and guacamole and we started to show the boys "more" in order to get a chip.  And it caught on like wildfire.  And I almost hit the ground when Alex came up 30 minutes later and made the "more" sign because he was hungry.  I felt like he was talking to me for the very first time.  So Kara and I are really hoping to add some more signs over the next couple of weeks.  It might help.  We have our first speech therapy appointment next week.

And not to be outdone ... Mr. Jakob is now saying, "What's that?"  and it is the cutest thing in the entire world.

Mary