Look Who's Talking Now

After 15 months of us waiting, hoping, wishing and working, in February Emilia was finally ready to venture into the world of speech.  It just happened one day when we were playing ball and I kept using the word and suddenly Emilia repeated "baw."  Since that day, Emilia has added a number of new words that she is using consistently, including bee (baby), ba-boo (balloon), up, hup (hop), appuh (apple), and boo (shoe).  A few days ago, she spoke her first sentence: she picked up Craig's sneaker, showed it to me and said, "Dada boo."

Meanwhile, I had suspected for quite some time that Emilia's muscles in the jaw, tongue and cheeks have low tone as evidenced by her continuing struggles with chewing solids and apparent inability to form certain sounds (note the predominance of Bs and Ps in the above list of words).  I also detected some signs of apraxia in her language development because the gap between her receptive and expressive language has been quickly widening and she is lacking precision and consistency in her use of spoken language.  If you remember, I used to mention how she could clearly say a variety of words, but only once and then we would not hear the word again for a long time, so very inconsistent.  The few words she has been using consistently over months have not been precise.  For example, eat has always been "eee" and no matter how I modeled and tried to get her to add a T at the end, it just didn't happen.  I can tell that Emilia struggles with motor planning because she clearly has the intent to make meaningful sounds now, in imitation and spontaneously, but simply cannot not form certain ones.  "L" and "la" are examples of such impossible sounds where she really attempts to move her tongue to get them out and just can't.

As you also know, Emilia has been attending weekly speech therapy at our local children's hospital for six months.  We have seen no progress from these sessions and the therapist has not adjusted her approach to try and meet Emilia's needs differently.  I even mentioned the apraxic qualities I was recognizing in her speech without receiving any actionable response or advice.  I was frustrated and began looking for a new option.

Enter Prompt Therapy.  Believe it or not, in our metropolitan area of over two million people, there is only one single provider for this type of speech therapy, so it took several weeks to even get Emilia in for an evaluation.  We finally completed the evaluation last week and Emilia is a great candidate for Prompt Therapy.  Prompt, unlike other speech therapies, uses precise tactile cues to teach the neuro-muscular structures of the face and mouth how to properly form sounds.  These movements, with practice, get wired into the brain, so that motor planning to produce sounds unassisted becomes easier over time.  I am very, very excited for Emilia to start weekly (or even twice weekly if we can work the logistics) Prompt sessions.  The therapist believes she has great potential and that we should see real progress within a month of attending therapy and supplementing with a home program.  Fingers crossed and I'll keep you posted.

Here's a little video from Emilia's first session today to give you an idea of what Prompt looks like in action:

Over the weekend, I attended a Prompt parent training course and after learning even more about the method, now I think it may be something to try with Rex as well.  The first step is to have him evaluated, so I hope to get an appointment for him soon.