Speech Therapy

Grace will start having speech therapy in a few weeks. She's been pretty difficult to understand (especially for strangers and family who doesn't get to see her much) but I figured she'd grow out of it. The more I heard her other daycare kids talk, the more I realized she had a problem. I took her last Friday for a screening and the therapist said she thought she was probably 30% inteligible to others. Her speech has no bearing on her intelligence and she knows LOTS of words and uses them correctly but her articulation is the problem. The therapist diagnosed her tentatively with Phonological Processing Disorder. It IS something she'll grow out of but it might take the next five years to happen and that's a lot of communication frustration and stigmatism to consider between now and then. She does get frustrated when I don't understand what she's trying to say and I don't want it to affect her self esteem sooooooo she'll have a full-fledged evaluation in a week or so and then we'll get her setup for therapy (hopefully at her daycare) in the next few weeks.

She's so funny because we've already started trying to sneakily work with her and get her to finish the hard consonants at the end of her words. She'll say Ba for Barn or Ball instead of finishing up the word. She can't say F's or H's hardly at all. We'll say BARN, can you say BARN or DOGGG can you say DOGGGG and she'll say "I already said Da!". She's no dummy that's for sure! She's already tired of our speech therapy efforts! Ha!

I'm looking forward to her speech improvements.. It will be good for us all. I had a lisp and remember going to speech therapy myself in Kindergarten. I just remember going to the little trailer with the slow kids for it. I hope I can get Grace caught up before the other kids know the difference.