Speech Therapy Evaluation

Truman had his long-awaited speech therapy evaluation this morning. For those of you who aren't familiar with the therapy world, speech therapists work on both speech delays and problems (as you would imagine), but they also work on feeding issues. Truman was evaluated for both.

With regard to Truman's speech itself, the preliminary report is that Truman scores are scattered between 9 and 12 months, with an abrupt wall at 12 months. (Truman is 14.5 months adjusted and 17.5 months chronological age). This is primarily because not only does Truman really only have one word (Dada), he doesn't seem to comprehend speech as well as he should at his age. A one-year-old should be able to follow simply commands, point to things, and gesture. Truman understands and responds to only a few phrases. Among them, "Come here," "Turn the page," and "No cords." That's pretty much it. So, we are going to have one session a week focusing on speech delays. By the way, no more "mamas" since the first day.

There is no real need to re-hash Truman's feeding issues because I've written about them plenty, but there are two primary concerns. First, he only eats completely pureed baby food or crunchy items such as cereal and crackers. With a few occasional anomalies, everything else is either refused completely or causes vomiting. Second, he doesn't take a bottle sitting up or make any real effort to drink without assistance, nor does he really attempt to use a cup or spoon. A lot of that probably has to do with the fact that Truman has a real aversion to having his hands touched, so it's very hard to manually demonstrate these skills for him. So, he'll be having one feeding session a week.

They also recommended that we consider the inpatient feeding boot camp at Our Children's House, but we told them that neither Truman or we are ready for that. He's still just too little to move away from home for 4-6 weeks even with one of us there 24/7. Also, we'd like to give outpatient feeding therapy a good, long try first.

That now means that Truman will be up to five therapy sessions a week -- two OT, one traditional ST, one feeding ST, and one PT. I realize that's a lot, and a lot of parents choose more of a "wait and see" approach to early delays, but we figure with his history, it can't hurt. We (or our insurance) can afford it, and he seems to like going to the "play place" as we call it. I think feeding therapy will cut down some of that enthusiasm, but we've seen the impact OT has had on his muscle tone issues (by virtually eliminating them) and the great improvement in fine motor skills that has happened since we started.