Speech Pathologist

Today was my second speech meeting.  Three ladies came to my house and played with me for an hour.  They asked me to do things while they also asked me, and mommy and daddy, questions.  Various tasks I mastered - a shape puzzle (child's play compared to my 24 piece puzzle), stacking blocks, kicking a ball, threading a string through balls (the picture above), playing with a baby doll and a dog.  Tasks I did ok with - drawing circles and lines on a paper, identifying pictures (I would point to each one correctly but could not say the name for most), jumping and standing on one leg.

Observations they made and stuff I need to work on:  They think I have low muscle tone (Hypotonia - for the medical folk out there) - when I get excited I tend to jump around and stick out my tongue, I might even drool a bit. I really only eat soft foods (grapes over apples, beans over meat, etc)  While I can walk and run fine now it was a bit delayed compared to my friends.  I have always been cautious when jumping still preferring to hold on to something for balance. I also didn't even have a tooth out when I turned one so my mouth has been a bit slow to develop. 

Reading up on Hypotonia: Speech difficulties can result from hypotonia. Low-tone children learn to speak later than their peers, even if they appear to understand a large vocabulary, or can obey simple commands. Difficulties with muscles in the mouth and jaw can inhibit proper pronunciation, and discourage experimentation with word combination and sentence-forming.

So the plan right now is to keep trying to encourage talking as much as possible and they suggested trying to get me to eat more mouth muscle challenging foods - like celery sticks, carrot sticks, smoothies from a straw, even twizzlers or gummies!

We meet again next Tuesday the 31st.  At that meeting we are going to set up some goals and then working on meeting them!