Posts Tagged ‘apraxia’

This video was taken two years ago (November 2009, age 5). C is talking about the pygmies and vampire bat in Pocket God. (Note his “I heart speech therapy” sticker)

Nearly a year later (August 2010). C reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Nearly a year later again (July 2011). C and D swimming in the pool. C is the one who says “it’s cold underwater”, so you can really measure the speech difference in him.

And in August 2011, C again reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

My kids lived their first four years in virtual silence. They sometimes made murmuring noises, and when they were four they could say “Ma” and “Da”, and “buh” (brother), but they were otherwise very quiet children. I spent a lot of tears and terror over their future, worrying about what would happen to them, how they would live if they never learned to speak.

I always say that I am grateful for my childrens’ every word. Everything they say is a delight to me, because they are finally speaking. In the last two years, they’ve gone from saying three approximations (not even real words) to monologuing about their Lego toys and Star Wars. Twin A can say an “f” correctly now, without an encroaching “p” behind it. This is a huge accomplishment for him, considering that two years ago, he had no words. They are turning more and more into regular six year olds. They lecture me. They talk back and are sarcastic. The other day, I had called them to bed about five times, and finally Twin B came back to the bathroom to brush his teeth and said to me, “I learned a new word at school today, Mama. It’s NAG.” They often stay up past their bedtime because they’re busy talking, or have a long conversation in the backseat of the car and tell me “I wasn’t talking to you, Mama” if I try to join in.

So now I finally, finally have the extreme parental pleasure of telling them something I never thought I’d get to say, which is “It’s time to stop talking now.” I feel a little weird every time I say it (only at bedtime, and followed by “… and go to sleep”), from all those years of trying to coax them to make a single sound. There’s a small fear in the back of my head that if I tell them to stop talking too many times, they’ll go back to the silence, but I try to ignore it and teach them when it’s appropriate to talk and when it isn’t, just like any other kid. They’re not always clear in their articulation, and there are a lot of phonemes they still have difficulty with, but the monologuing-like-a-supervillain gives me hope that they will someday master all their speech sounds.

Right now they’re at school, and I’m savoring the silence.

I wrote an article for Hippymom about CAS. Read it here.

Want to listen to my boys’ speech to hear what CAS sounds like? Our YouTube channel.

Our Apraxia Kids STARS page.

I uploaded that dinosaur video yesterday, and YouTube popped up a video in the “more like this” column that I had put up last year from their 4th birthday. And it was so odd to watch it and think it was only a year ago, because our paradigm has shifted so much since then. They were silent. The only word either of them spoke in the video was a garbled “Mama”. C signed a few times in the video, and otherwise they were silent. It jolted my heart to watch it. I listen to them now and worry about their pronunciation, they’re still so distorted, leaving out final consonants, and certain sounds are very hard for them to make, but they talk. They have a huge vocabulary. They talk in paragraphs. They lecture me. It’s wonderful. It’s such a huge change in just a year. It lets a little of the tension out of my personal cloud of motherly worry to see that change, and it gives me hope that they will get there one day. I want to try to remember this huge explosion of communication they’ve had in the last year whenever I feel panicky about their future, wrap it up in my heart and keep it close, something to give me hope.

Yes, I’ve now got my old Blogger posts imported to here. Well, most of them. I deleted a few, but the stuff about my kids’ speech progress was mainly what I wanted. It was fun to go back through them (adding categories and tags) and see how much progress my boys have made in the last two years, especially in the last year. A year ago, Weapon X could only say 9 words, and that was being generous counting approximations and “uh-oh”, which is only sort of a word. He’s talking in paragraphs now. His speech is still very distorted, but it’s a huge improvement in his expressive language, and he’s still making lots of progress. This morning he said “Dat’s so funny” with an F sound instead of the usual “punny”. Project Alpha’s made huge progress too, though is also very distorted. But it’s really encouraging, and sometimes I forget how far and how fast they’ve really come, so it was a good reminder. I still worry a ton about them, because they are still very delayed in their expressive language, but it’s getting there. It’s a huge relief to have them communicating. I used to cry almost every night about them not talking. And now, last week, I had to tell Alpha to stop talking and do what I told him to do.

So yeah, I’m glad the importing finally worked.