Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Speech Therapy Completed

So proud of Allie - she has made wonderful progress with her speech the last couple years.  She went from speaking a couple words to being completely mute.  Due to malnutrition, her brain had stopped developing and she was losing her speaking ability.  In December 2009, Allie received her feeding tube and started getting proper nutrition.  At that time, we enrolled her in speech therapy. 

Since January 2010, Allie has had weekly therapy sessions.  She has worked super hard at pronouncing her words correctly.  Allie and I have spent many hours at home repeating words and working on pronunciation. 

Last week her speech therapist said that Allie is, "age appropriate for her speech".   This is wonderful to hear.  I know there are still some sounds that she struggles with but apparently the majority of the kids her age struggle with it too.  So, her therapist gave me the following options on how to proceed:

1) Discontinue speech all together
2) Keep her on consult - basically meaning that Allie's therapist would evaluate Allie's speech every couple months to make sure she is progressing normally with new sounds, etc.
3) Keep her in speech but reduce her visits to bi-weekly.

I went with option #2.  We will keep Allie on the system and just evaluate her when necessary.  I will watch Allie at home and if I notice any new sounds that are not appropriate, I will have her evaluated right away, otherwise we will evaluate her at our scheduled times. 

Allie is very proud of herself for having completed speech class.  She is going to miss it though because she really liked her speech therapist (Mrs. O'Brien).  We have been so lucky to have so many wonderful therapist for Allie - we are truly blessed.

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