Speech Therapy

You may remember way back towards the beginning of the year when I posted about taking Alex to get his hearing tested because his doctor thought he sounded like he was probably a bit slow developmentally in his articulation of words. His hearing turned out to be fine, luckily. When the nurse was handing me the paper with the referral information on it, she told me that it would probably be a while before we could get him in for a speech evaluation because they have a waiting list. She told me that and I promptly forgot that there would be two separate evaluations.

So last week when the speech therapy place called to say they had an opening in their speech therapy and to call them back to schedule Alex for his evaluation, I was a little surprised. I ended up putting off calling them back until yesterday. I figured that it really wouldn't hurt to at least get him evaluated to see if they thought we needed to work with him on articulation. They had an opening today at 11:45, so I scheduled him for then and I took him in.

I've said it before, but I don't think I can say it enough how much I appreciate having Katie close by and willing to watch the other kids for me when I take someone to an appointment. It really makes it a whole lot easier to take one in and be able to talk to the doctor (or therapist) without other distractions. Especially for something like today, where she had to listen to Alex talk and listen to how he said things. If I had the other kids in there with me, they probably would have made that just a bit difficult. Although if I had them with me, I'd probably have had to stay in the waiting area with them while Alex went back on his own.

So anyway, we went back into their little evaluation room and the therapist brought out a book with pictures and had Alex tell her what was on the pictures. Pretty simple, and gets him to say all the sounds where there are typically problems. Alex has a few sounds he needs work on, like when he says "tar" for "car" and says "bacuum" instead of "vacuum." When he got through all the pictures, the therapist went over the sounds she noticed he did incorrectly. She pointed out that he did get all the sounds right at one time or another, but did need to work on some. And she did say it's possible that part of his problem with articulation is because of how large his tonsils were, that when he was learning how to talk, he had to learn to talk around them. That's not definitely the reason, but it could be.

So the results of today's evaluation is that now I get to take Alex back there every Friday for some speech therapy. She said she didn't think he needed to go twice a week, which is always good news. We'll be taking him once a week and hopefully he'll start to self-correct. Eventually we'll cut it down to every other week, and then just a home program.

I just hope insurance will cover most or at least part of the cost. :)