All the Talk About Speech and When the Talking Started

[Guest guest]

My 4 yr old made noise but didnt form any words till about 2. At

which time she would say a couple things like I See You, H,I,J,K

dadadada. Maybe a couple other things. We thought finally shes going

to talk and then with the acception of just babbling noises she lost

her words. Some unfortunate events happened around the same time.

We've been told that trauma can affect a childs action, but we don't

know if this contributed or if it was just her delays rearing.

None the less we got her into Early Intervention where she received an

hour of speech therapy and an hour of occupational therapy per week.

As far as words were concerned she really wasn't saying much. But she

has always spoke loudly with her actions. Example if she wants

something from the fridge she would grab your hand and take you to the

fridge. Whenever she would do this I would always say " say help " and

we'd get in the fridge and she would point to juice or cheese and i

would say " say juice " " say cheese " so on and so forth. She has always

been a pointer, she would walk around and just point to everything and

if she would point to something we would tell her what it was. My

mother would sit for hours and hours with her just letting her point

to things in books and telling her what the picture was.

She started and Intermediate Preschool class at 3 and had her weekly

therapies in there and the interaction with other children. And we

just continued constantly telling her what everything is. I always

tell her everything. Finally she started saying juice and cheese.

Soon she knew what a lot of things we were pointing at were and

although sometimes I am the only person who can understand her she is

repeating everything she can form with her tongue and lips. The most

notable was probably she likes to watch Dora and they had an episode

where they said hay, bridge, apple tree. And she just walked around

for weeks saying this over and over again. None the less there are a

lot of words she is incosistent with and a lot of words outside people

dont realize she is saying unless I tell them then they can understand

it but her mouth is just going going gone. There is still a lot of

periods of babble speech but you catch little words or piece of a song

you recongize and realize she is trying to mimic something.

During the process we have tried everything. At one point she even

seen a chiropractor because we read an article about it relieving

stress. So we took her an they scanned her spine and it shows you

where the stress is by a thermal scan and it showed a lot of stress.

And as we all know your nerves are in the spinal cord so she went for

about 6 weeks of therapy with that and we found that she was talking

more. (they didn't do the typical cracking bones)

None the less I'm sure many of you have done what we have done without

prevailing but hopefully this might give a few of you some ideas.

Heres to hoping we keep the speech in our house :-)

**amber