New Words

Sometimes it seems like Taylor is degressing in her clarity of speech on some words, but she is also learning new words. She is starting to tell me more and more what it is that she wants. One problem is that she sometimes just says "more" and "please" and I then have to figure out what she wants more of. She sometimes confuses more with eat, so I have to figure out if there is something that she just had or did that she wants more of or if she is hungry and wants something to eat. I think the reason she confuses the two is because when we first taught her the sign for more it was in relation to wanting more food and the signs for more and eat are somewhat similar.

Taylor is learning some new words and is learning more of her flash cards. I think it is more memorization than anything, but at least she is learning something. Sometimes her speech is not all that clear. It helps to have some kind of context in which to decipher what she is saying. Some words come out sounding like something totally unrelated. She also has trouble with certain sounds like the th sound on the ends of words or the s sound on the front of words. She also has trouble pronouncing r's and l's in the middle of words. She has just recently started saying fork and it comes out like a dirty word. Fortunately she usally just says it when we are eating, so everyone knows what she is trying to say. She also says mouse for mouth. It is really cute and I try not to be too hard on her but just give it back to her with the correct pronunciation so she can hear it. She used to leave off the ending consonant altogether, any ending consonant is an improvement. I am just glad to see her developing. Our next goal with the speech therapist is to get her to start speaking more clearly and to start putting two words together. She does certain words that way, but I want her to be more consistent with that. I think that is a very attainable goal for the next 6 months. She might even be saying phrases by then.

Speech Therapy

Taylor had her first speech therapy session this morning. I felt like it went well. She didn't come out with a bunch of words or anything, but Becky took a lot of notes and gave me some pointers of what I could work on with Taylor. Taylor seemed to lose interest in what she was playing with fairly quickly. She would get distracted by some of the other things that Becky brought with her. Becky was very patient with her and tried to get Taylor back on task. One thing I have noticed her doing is actually taking Taylor's hand and making her do what she wants her to do instead of doing it for her. She told me to take her hand and make her point to things. She also told me to practice taking turns with her like rolling the ball and putting snap beads back in their container and even making noises. This gets her used to imitating and hopefully will encourage her to imitate words. She is doing that some but not a lot yet. Another thing she wants me to do as time permits is silling things like putting one shoe on Taylor or getting her ready for a bath without putting water in the tub. The idea is to get her to point to tell me what's not right. I am skeptical that Taylor will catch on to that one right now, but we will see. Becky will come back next week for our second session.