speech therapy for Samuel

I mentioned in my last post, where I copied and pasted our 2013 Christmas letter, that I was doing so, in part, to reference an update about Samuel's speech. I'll do that now. 

In our Christmas letter I mentioned how caveman Samuel was starting to talk very slowly and did a lot of grunting. He can communicate and so it's not like he can't talk at all. In fact he does quite of a bit of jabbering, it's just that a lot of it is unintelligible. Then of course, some of it is understandable. It just depends. And we'd noticed that he was very slowly getting a little better with his words. 

At any rate, I had spoken to our doctor about this about Samuel a few months earlier but she was not concerned and said we'd reevaluate at his three year check. Well Samuel turned three on February 1st and at his checkup the doctor referred him for speech therapy. It was kind of a relief. I felt like then at least we could help him. 

So on February 18th he had a speech evaluation done by a speech therapist at Children's Care. She thought he had a lot of words and definitely wanted to communicate, but was leaving off the ends of most of his words. She also wasn't convinced that he could hear properly. I didn't think that was an issue, and neither did the doctor at his checkup (I asked especially about that), but the speech therapist  wanted to be absolutely sure. She did a hearing test that said to have him referred. 

So on February 28th Samuel saw an audiologist with the school district where he was evaluated. He did great. He sat in this sound proof little room with me and wore headphones without a single complaint and followed all of her instructions. Here he is pointing at the pictures of the words she's telling him in the earphones.

He passed the two tests she administered to him and then also passed this final test as well. I can't remember what all she tested, but it was all variety of pitches and he was in the clear. 

That was good news. So just this week (March 10th), Samuel finally began his speech therapy. It was pretty basic, a lot more simple than I thought it would be. She had him match picture shapes to a simple wooden puzzle and try to say the words of each piece - cat, dog, phone, etc. He couldn't put the piece where it went until he made a good attempt at each word. He got most of the sounds but left off the ends of words. He struggled with the "n,t and c" sound for sure, especially at the ends of words. She told me that it wasn't just laziness on his part, but a legitimate problem that lots of kids have. So then she gave Terry and I homework too - to work on really enunciating our words to Samuel and to try to get him to repeat things back to us. So we'll do that and if you see Samuel you can too. :) And hopefully all of this will help!

And yet he's been coming along on his own too. Just today he was sneaking up on me like a ferocious dog or cat and when he made a swipe at me said, "I got you." And I could totally understand him! That's progress for Samuel. 

Update complete.