Speech

Daniel waving Hi

Big Oliver smile

The boys together

Shanna with her niece

Oliver was evaluated yesterday to see if he qualifies for interventions. No he doesn't. In past evaluations, he was way past most milestones except expressive language. He was taught American Sign language as his fingers were more agile than his tongue. He does speak now and puts words together but he misses final consonant sounds and it is very difficult to figure out what he is saying unless you know his terminology. He calls his brother "Ga-ga'. Yesterday however when asked what was his brother's name, he said "Daniel". He can not say his own name though. When choosing a name for a child and if there is any chance of speech difficulties, try not to give a name that has an R and an L in it if you want the child to say it any time soon. Josh had similar pronunciation issues that I had to take him to a speech therapist for. While pregnant with Naomi, I decided that there was a chance she'd inherit this difficulty in repeating difficult sounds and decided not to go with Steve's choice with a name containing both an R and an L. Of course before Naomi was 2, she was able to clearly repeat this name. She has many challenges but speech does not seem to be one of them. It is true that in general boys are more likely than girls to have these speech issues but my mother (with the most severe case) and I had (have) too. Presumably I was mute until 3 or 4. I was sent by my grandmother to nursery school at 3 to hopefully learn to speak. I apparently did as I was not sent back the next year. But I do embarrassingly have trouble repeating certain sounds. I try to learn foreign languages but that just gives me more sounds to butcher. I practice quite a bit to overcome this.

Ugh! It is even colder today. Back to the Y if I want exercise.