Talking with Toddlers

Alex's speech is getting much clearer and his vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds every day. The new games I developed for him appear to be working very well.  What seemed to make all the difference in the world was using the "I do, Daddy does, Alex does" model. Having him watch his Dad "learn how to talk"

"Dad, this is a dog, can you say.. Dog?"  (DOG) "GOOD JOB!!!!" "Alex, can you say dog?"

  While the speech therapist hasn't worked with him yet as she was ill this past Monday, I think that it is a possibility he might be caught up by the time he turns three or not that long afterwords if we keep going at this rate.

They recommended giving him 2 choices. Example "Alex, do you want Milk?" (showing him the milk) "or Juice?" (showing him the juice) The first few times Alex just pointed so I took that a step further as Alex just loves mimicking his parents actions. While Alex was watching I would turn to his Dad and say "Daddy, do you want Milk? or Juice?. When his Dad would say "Juice" I praise him and give him juice. Alex clapped for his Dad and acted like he wanted to try so I turned to Alex and repeated the excersize. The first time Alex pointed to the juice and said "Juice".

Alex is at or above all developmental levels with the exception of expressive language.  He is still beyond his level for receptive speech.  The new tool used determined he is approximately 7 months behind on Expressive Speech so he qualifies for Speech Therapy. He has no red flags for autism.

 Some strategies we were given today:

1. Do not anticipate his needs

2. Give him choices

3. Explore sign language more

4. sing songs with finger plays

5. Point to /label pictures in books

6. Use pretend play to encourage language.

 We're doing all but #6 so we'll be doing some pretend play soon. We were given some additional ideas for activities on 1-5. Alex does get sign language from me but usually does not repeat the signs often so we will make a concerted effort to do more sign language with him.

His goal is obvious: to talk - we will consider that goal achieved once he learned to communicate in words to adults and peers. I want him to catch up to at least his level before he is dismissed from speech therapy. I realize that this is a participatory process and my husband and I will be with him during all speech therapy sessions and will continue the excersizes we observe during his sessions between sessions.

This video was recorded about 10pm tonight following a 45 minute "play" session with some flash cards and 10 minutes of Coloring time. Alex did not appear interested in play time tonight like he usually is. My mother in law was staying with us and I'm not certain if his playtime mood was changed by that or not but I made the mistake of not setting my expectations with her before the play time and I think that confused things. The video below is about 2 minutes long and shows how Alex sometimes communicates with us. Not many breaks exist in his sounds like usual whenever he is tired. I cannot tell for sure if this is a form of "whining" or if he really thinks he is talking. He is looking at both his grandma and I while he was "talking".

The video below shows some clips of this evenings playtime along with his attempts at 'apple'.  This was taken about a half hour after his normal bedtime. He brought a book to me and showed interest in reading it so I took advantage of the time.

Tonight instead of me taking control of the book, I let him have it. Watching the video clips provided good feedback to how I can improve our playtime.

 1. Slow down my speaking more

2. Have Alex look at my mouth more when I'm speaking.

3. I never realized I refer to myself as 'mommy' instead of 'me' while playing with him. Is that a bad thing? I have no idea when I started doing that and not really sure if its a bad thing or not.

 

In my last post, I detailed a new game I developed with Alex.

Today we played the game again and he said 'apple' (it actually came out 'appa') He only said that word when pointing to the apples on the page. Not only did he say it once, he said it SIX TIMES!!!!! 

He also now tries to say 'balloon' when pointing to the balloons but says ' hoom'

Another new word is 'blue' when pointing to the color 'blue' in the book. he says 'ou' (its came out bu-ho) a couple of times.

 

 

Alexander likes to do everything we do. Vacuum (which he does believe it or not), we sometimes let him throw his diapers in the trash. He cleans up after himself, acts like hes shaving, brushes his teeth with help while we're brusing ours etc. I'm constantly surprised just how much information he takes in by watching us alone and repeats in action.  Thinking on his fascination with learning through observing I started making a game of it recently.

Sitting at the table during Alexanders alert time seems to be the best way to work on communication and to spend uninterrupted time with him.

I put him in an adult chair on a booster to the right of me, and his Dad directly in front of me.  During our time at the table the object is to keep all attention on one thing at a time.

Tonight we read 'Elmo's guessing game about colors'. Its one of his favorite books to read right now. I go through the book with him one page at a time. I read the words on the page slowly and then I point to each object in order they appear on the page naming each one.

Read more:

My husband said "Alex, I'm going to take a shower" Alex repeated shower but it came out Shour

I shot this brief video tonight around 9pm. Alex was very tired and moody so his tolerance for frustration was quite low however this clip pretty much displays a conversation that we have when he wants something...  I think Open for him is DunDon but I'm not sure. He doesn't say that here but usually when he's not so tired he will.  We got to this door because he grabbed my hand and walked me to it. (Rubbing those poor tired eyes the whole way) I saw a post where you wanted parents to upload videos. Well here you go... He watches us work out sometimes so he wanted to check out the gym. Usually he can unlock doors with no problem but that particular door is hard to unlock. (Thankfully)

This video was from when he was 8 months old ((see comment))

I just got off of the phone with someone from ECI who thought my call to Austin was a complaint call. It was really just a call to get someone to call me back so I could get my son back into the ECI system for speech therapy but since she was on the phone I expressed my concern about Alex being denied services back in November because their tool indicated only a five month delay.  I know that Alexanders RECEPTIVE speech is way ahead.  His EXPRESSIVE speech is what is behind, and it is very behind. I mentioned that a speech pathologist I had conversed with briefly online had mentioned that his word list seemed to indicate a greater than 5 month delay and that research I had done on my own indicated a greater than 5 month delay as well and I wouldn't be too hesitant to say that Alex was probably around 8 months behind at the time he was assessed for Expressive Delay.   

 She had looked over my case and told me that the state approved tool for language assessment did not separate RECEPTIVE from EXPRESSIVE speech and that she had realized that when looking over it.  My stupid side never even questioned them about that while going through the assessment. I figured that was all taken into account by professionals.  She mentioned that they have some tools they can use which can break receptive and expressive language development out but its not state approved.  My response is there should be state approved tools that break out RECEPTIVE and EXPRESSIVE speech. Its not normal, but I've seen EXPRESSIVE delays multiple times where RECEPTIVE language seemed fine.  To think those kids may be denied help and parents believing that their kids are only X months behind when really they're XX months behind is not a good thing. So they're going to look into getting a state approved tool to break those out for kids being assessed with language delays.

ECI finally called me back today. I'm so happy I could jump out of my birthday suit.

Now I'll get a callback in four -five business days to set up a consultation which should happen a week or two from that phone call. Then he'll get an assessment sometime within 45 days of that consultation.   I tracked down someone in Austin who tracked down someone at the denton office who tracked down... nevermind.

I requested a different consultant and speech pathologist as well. The ones I had were nice but it would probably be better to have a different team do the re-evaluation this time around.

New words/phrases used appropriatly

'My Turn' - 'pizza' - 'eat' - 'hot' - 'momma hot'

 Whats really funny about the 'momma hot' phrase...

When Alex gets close to the stove I always say HOT!   followed by (this will hurt you don't touch it)  He fully understood the instructions I gave him as usual.  Every now and then when he sees me cooking at the stove he'll walk up to me, stick his bum out, point to the stove and scream ' MOMMA HOT!!!' Its the cutest thing. I praise him and tell him that is right so momma has to be real careful. 

Still waiting on ECI to respond... I've called once every 3 days since my last post here...

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As of yesterday, my 2 year old started refusing to sleep in his crib. We've had a toddler bed in his room for about 2 months and he knows what its used for. Not only can he crawl out of his playpen (and does in .25 seconds) he can also crawl over safety gates (and does in .25 seconds)

He has never had a problem going to bed. We've never really had a problem with bedtime until yesterday when he crawled out of his playpen. We coslept the first 8 months of his life and moved him to the playpen once he stopped waking up to breastfeed at night.

Last night, knowing that playpen sleeping wasn't going to work, we went through our normal night time routine. I told him its bedtime and he has to sleep in his "big bed" now since he has graduated from his playpen. He happily hopped into his toddler bed, covered himself up and laid down. For the time he's had the bed in there, he'll make it up on his own and put his favorite stuffy in it too. As soon as I went through the normal routine of "night night" and began to walk away he started screaming terrified and got up. I gently but firmly put him back in the bed (we repeated this excersize several times) I stayed in there with him for a while but he wanted to play. We repeated the "put the boy back to bed" excersize numerous times while I sat there. It became obvious he just didn't want to go to bed.

A speech pathologist was supposed to be out to visit Alexander along with another specialist to do a complete assessment. Alexander started out with a cold so we had to reschedule, then ended up with bacterial pneumonia and so the appointment was pushed off to recently.

The speech pathologist was very nice and so was our coordinator. They both spent quite a bit of time doing little activities with Alex and asking his Dad and I a lot of questions. I got nervous when they started giving him activities to do that I had not even tried thinking that he wouldn't get it because we had not done that before, but he didn't seem to have a problem with any of them accept one where they laid pictures out of items and he had to go get those items and match them to the picture. He wanted to show the picture to his Dad and I instead.

He was denied speech therapy. He shows a 5 month delay, but they require him to have a 6 month delay in speech therapy. If he had a delay in any other area, they would have given him the therapy. He had an average of being in the 28 month range in all other categories.

One of the things I noticed was, after he got sick he started babbling more than he used to. The coordinator had asked if he had ever experienced a traumatic event and we went into his poopy problems. He got constipated when he was about 13 months old and it took two hours, the grandma, the doctor and the grandpa's help to disimpact him. He was terrified already when I brought him to grandma's and called the doctor because I realized he was holding his poopies in and seemed scared to go to the bathroom. He had off and on poopy problems since the first time he got constipated on formula we had to suppliment with for a while until I could get my milk production up to his appetite level.

I realized while talking to the nurses about it, that Alexander had quit babbling right after that. I even went to check out his videos because I knew the time frame of all of that. There is no babbling in his videos after that.

6 months, the doctor had him on prune juice and non-constipating foods. Still, even with the prune juice, we had to give him suppositories and enemas at least once or twice a week. He was terrified every time to go to the bathroom. I cannot even tell you how stressed this house was during the time we had to deal with this. The prune juice worked sometimes very well, but it wasn't consistent, and if it was just solid enough to hold in, he would. To prevent the impaction he had when he was 13 months old, we had to help him go to the bathroom if he held it for more than 2 days. It was obviously a behavioral problem. When the prune juice DID work, we had to deal with constant gas pains from the juice and any other food that acts as a natural laxative. My friend told me about one of her kids that had a similar problem at that she was put on Miralax. I took my son in to see the pediatrician two days later and talked to him about it and he consented to trying it. It immediatly worked, not only that, but we're going on a month and a half of no traumatizing bathroom experiences, he's not afraid of having his diaper changed anymore, and his seeming fear of pooping is going away as he doesn't run off to go hide to hold them anymore.

I also realized that about the time he started babbling again would have been about a month after the last time we've had to make him have a poopy.

We knew that whole ordeal was extremely stressful for Alex - it was very stressful for us as well because it was a *daily battle* - The days I knew we'd have to make him go to the bathroom, I dreaded coming home.

I feel guilty for not pushing the issue harder with his doctor but kept insisting that this is something normal that some kids experience. I don't know, I don't think any child should experience recurring extreme stress like that ESPECIALLY WHEN THERE IS A PERFECT (*&#$) ALTERNATIVE OUT THERE THAT WILL FIX IT

I know that the drug has risks of dependence, but he was already dependent and the risks of taking it do not outweigh the benefits in this case. Also, the few times it did look like he was about to have a problem, we didn't have to give him an enema because the next dose would clear it up. Finally, he seems interested in potty training, his stress levels have gone down and he seems more interested in communicating.

He learned 5 new words this week. We still have a long way to go though.

Thanks for listening...