Speech Therapy

For those of you that know Joey well, you know that he isn't always the easiest kid to understand. At his 5 year checkup we finally insisted on finding out if we should do something other than hope he outgrew it. The doctor recommended speech therapy so today was the day that we went for his initial consultation.

It took an hour and they couldn't have been nicer. They were right on time, no waiting at all and interacted with him so well. Obviously since they are used to seeing kids with speech problems they understood almost every word he said and he loved having such wonderful conversations. They had to do all these tests; books of pictures, vocabulary testing, etc. She said that he did wonderfully. He definitely has issues with certain letters which she noticed particularly when he was talking in long sentences. She said he had a great attention span, was a very sweet boy, polite and very intelligent. Actually for the vocabulary piece of the test he is ranking at upwards of a 6 year old.

The problem is all of his issues are due to bad habits. He is not forming his mouth correctly when he speaks the sound. Therefore this could take a while to correct which will probably include speech specialists in school as well. She said that it is DEFINITELY all curable, but like any bad habit it takes a long time to change.

I feel confident though, that with her help we will make the changes necessary. Here's to a long road ahead of us, probably 1-2 years....YIKES!!!

Moral of the story ~ if you think something isn't right, follow up right away. If we would of seen to this when we first noticed it at 2 1/2, instead of waiting to see if he'd outgrow it, we would be going down a much shorter road.