Hellobee

It finally happened; our little guy is talking! He’s two and half, and after almost a year of therapy, he’s speaking in phrases. A few changes in our interactions with him finally tipped his speech development. While he’s not totally caught up, it is so wonderful he can communicate his wants and needs. Here’s what seemed to help.

Our little guy had always tested far ahead in receptive language (understanding speech) for his age, it was his expressive speech that was delayed. Our little guy had a large vocabulary of single words, but he couldn’t link the words together for phrases. This baffled me, until I realized the missing piece of language for him – verbs.  If you listen to toddlers’ phrases they tend to say things like “hold cup” or “go bye-bye mama.” Those phrases include verbs. Often toddlers can say verbs and not the nouns, but the situation was reversed with our little guy. He could name any item in a book: cow, car, tree, etc… He also had higher level language skills, at the time, because he could say descriptive and comparison words like big and little, and his colors.

Once I realized it was verbs he was didn’t have in his vocabulary. I changed how I talked to him. Before, I would say “let’s eat eggs,” or “pull your wagon with the toys.” I was using longer phrases trying to build his vocab like I did with our daughter, which worked for her. But with our little guy, I switched to shorter phrases, and repeated the verb. If it was breakfast time, I would ask, “Eat? Eat breakfast? Eat eggs?” Sometimes I would even act out the verb, which I’m sure made me look ridiculous in public. At first he didn’t understand what I was asking, but then he made the connection. He started using single words, but verbs instead of nouns.  I thought he had regressed because he stopped using nouns for a week, but then shortly after he started putting together phrases. Not just two word phrases either, he was saying three and four – word phrases.

A few other things were happening at the same time. With summer vacation started, BeBe was home and he had someone else to play (and bicker) with all day, and I could help guide his speech socially. I also moved him out of his comfort zone and took him to Vacation Bible School, which pushed him to sing and talk to other kids. (Although that experience had its own set of challenges with sensory issues). We also took a mini lake vacation with the extended family.  He was surrounded with new experiences, lots of family, and incentives to talk and ask for fun things like “more boat ride?” These new experiences, having BeBe home, and focusing on verbs and shorter phrases, combined with months of therapy seem to help his speech break through.

Our little guy still has some struggles ahead. His speech is not clear, and it can be very difficult to understand him. Previously, we had decided not to work on his speech clarity for two reasons. First, his speech therapist explained most kids have a hard time doing the therapy to produce clear speech sounds until after their third birthday. The second reason we waited, was that we didn’t want to discourage his attempts at talking by correcting his speech.

Now that he’s been talking in phrases for about month, I notice he hesitates to continue talking if we don’t understand him. He gets stuck repeating a phrase until we understand. Thankfully, our little guy doesn’t become frustrated with us, but I also don’t want to stall his progress when I can see he wants to tell us more. We’ve started asking his speech therapists for techniques to work on speech clarity. He may be a bit young, but I figure we can sporadically attempt these exercises, and if he responds well, then will just go with it. Either way, I’m so happy to hear my sweet little boy’s voice when he says “want more cookie!”