Tongue Tied

Aaron, my sweet big boy. He needs some time in the spotlight. We are so proud of him, especially as of late, and we have much to be proud of.

Aaron has always, since birth, been a little bit slower in accomplishing mile stones. And perhaps not compared to all but there were definite lags in some. One of the biggest challenges for him as been speech. He never babbled, neither did Olivia as a baby, but Aaron was even less. When Aaron was 26 mos he was evaluated by several speech and child devolpmentalists and they all agreed that Aaron was delayed. His communicative output was that of a 113 month old and his fine motor skills were at a 17 month old's. He was to start in home therapy within a month, but there office backed up and we ended up dealing with the start of Leukemia so finally in August we were assigned a "teacher" and we, Aaron, has been working hard ever since. He has very specific speech delays. He doesn't have any frontal sounds. So instead of "d" he says "g" and "k" for "t". Any sound that is formed at the front of your mouth, "ch, sh, l," is not possible. Once we learned this we were able to start understanding him better. Also, he wasn't putting ending consonants on anything. Late in September, we were at one of Livi's appointments and I told Aaron "after the doctor, we're going to the park for park day". He looked at me, held his hand up to his throat, (that's what we taught him to do when he's trying to make a throat sound as opposed to a frontal sound) and said, "pa'...K.  pa'..K, PA'K!". I don't know who was more excited me or him. He totally realized what he had just done and kept saying it over and over. He found other ending consonants that day as well. "DoG" and "biKe" to name a few. You could see the light bulb working over time over his little head!

He has continued to excel and last week he had his evaluation to see how far behind he still is. If he failed, it meant that he was still significantly delayed and would receive state paid for preschool and even get to ride on a school bus...he's been sooo excited. If he passed, it meant that he was fine and preschool, if we chose to put him in, would be paid for just like everyone else. Leading up to the eval. his therapists and I have been nervous. We've always known he

was bright, he just seems to have some issues with oral speech and common sense rules. They prepped me with how to point out all his flaws. I felt bad focusing on the negative but we were going to do what we had to do. Well the morning came and of course, he was wearing his big boy spidey underwear, (that did not help our side) he even used their toilet 3 times for pee and once for poop! That definitely didn't help our side! Not only that but I guess he's even smarter than we all thought. He evaluated with 3 different specialists and all 3 of them had to bring out more advanced modalities and flash cards. It was so cute to watch him. He would study the card/modality, point to an answer, and then say,"ummm, no..." change his mind and point to the right one and say, "yeah". The whole time with his head cradled in his left hand, with his left elbow resting on the little desk. Way too cute! His IQ came out to be on the high end of his age range, I don't remember the number, I just remember thinking, there goes free preschool, and from the language specialist, his comprehension tested at a 5 year old's! 5! He's still not quite 3! She said that he could still probably qualify for speech (which would be therapy once a week for an hour at a time) but preschool wasn't looking promising. I just smiled and shook my head. I have a little boy genius on my hands whose only Achilles heal is that he's tongue tied! As we were driving away the "little Einstein" saw a school bus and said, "my 'kool buk" (keep in mind, still no frontal sounds) I smiled turned to him and said, "some day", just not when you're 3.

On top of his speech continually improving, and this awakening to his brain power, Aaron is also well on his way to being potty trained. He loves his big boy underwear and HATES putting on his pull up for naps and night time. I will say I'm having a tough time battling him anymore because the last 4 days he's woken up dry from both. I just don't think I'm ready for the possible consequence of an accident.