Speech update

I haven't posted on Blake's speech in a bit, so I figured I would. Blake is still working on learning more signs and seems to be doing well with picking them up. He has mastered a few of then and is beginning to use the independently, with Richard and I. He now knows and uses: 'more', 'milk', 'please', 'open', 'all done', 'sorry', 'baby', 'go', and 'cookie'. We are working on 'bathroom', 'music', 'water', 'banana', 'drink', and 'eat'.

We are working on the sounds /m/, /p/, /b/, /ee/ and /o/. The latest thing is to have Blake look at our mouth as we form the sounds correctly so he can see how it should look. Also, when we say /b/and /p/ we have him feel the air come out of his mouth. One thing that we are noticing is that he is saying a lot of the sounds with a nasal tone to it. This very well could be connected to the fact that he is tongue tied and his tongue is interfeering with the sounds ability to escape his mouth correctly.

At this time, we are strongly considering talking to an ENT to find out how complicated this would be to correct. How envasive is this procedure? How long is the recovery time? We feel that this needs to be done. We have come to the conclusion that it will help in so much in the long run to have it corrected soon. Richard is crazy busy right now at work, but it is high on the priority list after his work quiets down a bit. I'm also thinking about asking the speech therapist to look at Colby too to see if we should consider having Colby's tongue taken care of now too.

I just hope that getting it done will help him. I just hope it will provide him the jump he needs to correct his articulation issues. I just want to be able to clearly understand my little guy... for both of us!
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8 comments:

  1. I really don't know a whole lot about the tongue tied issue but I had a friend whose daughter was tongue tied. They clipped it in the doctors office and said that it would bleed alot but that there were no nerves there so it wouldn't hurt. They did it and she went straight home with no problems at all. Big improvement afterwards according to her too.

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  2. I have worked with kids that have overcome a tongue time just by practicing and stretching type exercises but I have worked with a few that have had it clipped as well. Some doctors are totally against it these days. If you are going to do it, it is better to do it early. The longer you wait the more trouble they seem to have because they almost have to re-learn how to use their tongue for speech once it has all that mobility that was never there before.

    It sounds like Blake is doing great with his signs and picking them up pretty quick!

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  3. We used Dr. Moser at Nemours for our ENT needs!!! He was great! Don't get too discouraged!! Some of this I think they grow out of. Thankfully, the school district as you know, give free speech therapy! My friends son went through it and is doing great!

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  4. I hope that getting his tongue fixed will help out...because it seems that everything else he is doing is going great!

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  5. I know that the morning we took Jill for her ear tubes there were kids there for your son's condition. I would say it is worth looking into!!

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  6. Blake is so lucky to have parents like you. It is so great you are proactive like this.

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  7. it certainly doesn't hurt to talk to the ENT and get their feelings on it. I think the tubes were the best thing for Riley so maybe Blake needs the ENT too.

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  8. My friend's son had that done and I think they waited too long, some of his bad speech patterns were really cemented. So I would see since you already know it's an issue. I don't think it was too terrible. His speech is fine now, it just took longer.

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