okay. so MonkeyBeef had fluid in his ears and couldn't hear worth a shit between the ages of 1 and 2. he got
tubes in his ears at the beginning of april. he immediately starting saying all kinds of consonant sounds... but then he never really started incorporating them into words. and he didn't really start using words to express his wishes.
to make a long story short, and avoid boring you with the minutiae of diagnostic criteria and MonkeyBeef's personal speech quirks... we have found ourselves in the strange, foggy land of toddler speech therapy. disorders are often poorly defined, the definitions are sources of disagreement between clinicians, and they often have overlapping borders, anyway. add to this mess the fact that toddler language development is highly variable, and toddler attitudes toward therapy and therapists range from "i'd love to help you, but i'm busy" to "who are you, what are you doing, and why are you in my face?" to "FUCK YOU I WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME!" ...and it seems that toddler speech therapy is equal parts whistling in the dark, pissing in the wind, and placebo guzzling, possibly with some very helpful therapy mixed in, though it's impossible to tell for sure.
low muscle tone? maybe. he still drools a bit. but he has no difficulty with eating and swallowing like you might expect if that was the problem. apraxia? it seems a good fit for his set of quirks - he learns something, but then seems to need to relearn it many times. he "gropes" - seems to know what he wants to say, but stands there with his mouth twitching, like he can't figure out how to get it to do what he knows he wants to do. lots of metathesis: "web" is "beh," for example, and "bag" is "gaeh." errors are inconsistent - "cookie" may come out as "beebee" or "poopie." but the ONLY symptom that ALL sources of diagnostic criteria agree upon as a symptom of apraxia is prosodic errors, meaning the rhythm is off: stresses on the wrong syllables, words in a sentence are given equal weight and pitch, making it loud, monotone, robotic. guess what the one thing he doesn't fuck up is? prosody. does that mean it can't be apraxia? maybe. but many of the therapy suggestions for apraxia work for him. so...
then again, maybe there isn't anything wrong with him at all beyond being stuck trying to catch up after missing a year of language development. after months of worrying that he wasn't making any progress, he suddenly did. a few weeks ago - a full three months after we got his hearing straightened out - he suddenly started using "jargon," which is sentence-length jibberish, with all the intonations and form of speech, but no actual words. he suddenly added about 20 words to his vocabulary in one weekend, some with pretty reasonable pronunciations - "boh" for boat, "ohpmeew" for oatmeal. he's got a vocabulary of over 100 words, and he's starting to use use some 2-word combinations.
but he's getting dragged into it kicking and screaming. to get him to say the word "berry," i held one out of his reach and wasn't going to give it to him til he at least tried to say it. there was drama - loud, gesticulative drama - until SpazMonkey wandered into the kitchen and asked, "WHATCHOO DOIN- HEY ARE THOSE MY FAVORITE BERRIES?" i beckoned him over, told him to say "berry," really loud, and then handed the berry to him. it got a horrified MonkeyBeef to say berry. why is he so reticent? because he's a butthead? because it's hard? how hard? as hard as you would expect for any kid who missed a year of hearing, or harder than that because of some unknown deficiency? no telling.
basically, a diagnosis of any kind is unlikely for another year, maybe two. in the meantime, we're throwing all the possible help we can at him. the magically creative audiologists actually got him to cooperate with a hearing test (normal!), so they set him up with a speech pathologist for weekly therapy sessions. i think the guy is pretty sharp, asks good questions, notices everything, seems to know his shit.
then there's the state social workers. three of them seem to have suddenly arrived at the consensus that he's a "disorganized thinker," in need of occupational therapy to make the language therapy possible. they arrived at this conclusion in noting that a) he has to "reorganize" when he's interrupted (they try to move a toy he's playing with, he grabs it and puts it back the way he had it) and b) nearly 30 minutes into a session, in which he sat and played quietly with a series of toys they presented to him, he had to get up, run around the room once, leap onto a chair, rock it, flip off the back of it, and then come back to play with the toys.
i'll skip the disparaging remarks about intelligence levels and occupations, and just say this: i'm not feeling it. as always, my reality check is what these people would have made of my older three kids - because MonkeyBeef is the most normal-acting toddler of the bunch. by very, very fucking far. these social workers probably would have wanted every one of them institutionalized. it was reading dozens of message-board posts from other parents who had waded through the toddler language therapy morass - most of them horror stories of conflicting diagnoses, therapy sessions that annoyed the kids so much that they spoke LESS, and pathologization of every little quirk, no matter how benign - that convinced me to decline any evaluations or therapy for the twins, despite the fact that they were at least six months behind on every language milestone. christ, we're pretty sure DramaQueen didn't know his name wasn't SpazMonkey until he was about 3-1/2, and his kindergarten teacher called him a genius. EvilGremlin couldn't get a handle on the concepts of past and future until he was 5, and he's off the charts smart on every standardized test he's ever taken (except for that first one in kindergarten. he was too busy arguing with the test - rewriting the questions so they made more sense, explaining why this or that answer could be right or wrong in different situations - to fill in the multiple choice bubbles, and scored so low that he actually got sent to special ed the next day, over his teacher's protests. but she sat back and waited, and sure enough, the special ed teacher brought EG back to his kindergarten teacher just before lunch, saying "this child does NOT belong in my class." his kindergarten teacher laughed her ass off every time she told that story; she said EG was "so gifted she didn't know what to DO with him.")
so anyway. right now we've got a legion of social workers who want to send MonkeyBeef - the kid who can ride a skateboard, advance, lunge and hit a target with recognizable fencing footwork, throw a ball, clean up his own toys WITHOUT BEING ASKED TO (if you do not have kids, you cannot fully appreciate how utterly otherworldly this is), play a game of candyland and more or less adhere to the rules, dress and undress himself - to an "occupational therapy" preschool in cedar rapids, because they think he is unable to "plan" (brushing off numerous desciptions i've given them of very involved, intricate planning on his part), and because, despite a stunning lack of supporting evidence as far as i can tell from my perusal of journals on the topic, they seem to think that pushing him to plan gross-motor actions will magically improve his motor-planning related to language (despite the fact that even i know damn well that those two things light up completely different areas of the brain in those cute little medical textbook illustrations that show you where your brain does "math" and "anger" and whatnot.)
times like these, i'm glad PositiveRoleModel has an MD and a PhD. when i tell these "experts" i disagree with them, maybe i'm just a hysterical mother in denial. when PRM disagrees, they don't get to dismiss him. when i relayed the social workers' diagnosis and recommendation to him, he interrupted me with "stop. you had me at 'cedar rapids.' these jokers who think teaching him to straighten out a beach towel on the floor will help him learn how to talk (true story!) are not sending my boy to the asshole of iowa to go to some shithole crack-baby daycare. where he'll catch down syndrome. and learn how to start fires."
times like these, i'm also glad PRM is a butthead. he's got his afternoons off this month, so he'll be home in a week and a half when 4 social workers and a school district representative will descend upon our kitchen table for a meeting to plan out the boy's educational future. you think i've got a sharp tongue? this should be legendary. look forward to that post!
overall, though, we're not worried. like, at ALL. weird, huh? it's probably because we've been through so much worse with the other boys over the years; this is maybe the 10th most worrisome thing that's happened. tops. but seriously, language is my thing. i am on this like flies on a dogturd. i bought several speech and language pathology and therapy textbooks from amazon and have been pounding my way though them. doesn't make me an expert, but it does make me more able to offer relevant information to his speech therapist, and better able to continue to implement the therapy outside of his sessions. he only gets a half hour a week with his therapist, but a few hundred dollars on amazon and a summer of not reading fencing books or reading for pleasure, and i can make all day, every day, one god-a'mighty big-ass language therapy session. of doom.
i'm also motivated to homeschool him like this... so i won't have to homeschool him. little shit needs to get caught up in time to go to kindergarten. i have a novel i've been planning to finish as soon as i have those 30 hours a week. kinda like my mom saying my sister and i had to go to school unless we were puking blood; unless he's got apraxia so bad that he needs an assisted language device, his little ass is taking his indiana jones lunchbox across the street for 6 hours a day, 200 days a year.
