Progress

So that you can fully appreciate this, I am going to give you some background. After a well baby visit about two and a half years ago, Robert's pediatrician recommended that we have him evaluated, which of course, we did. He was diagnosed with severe speech and language delays and had some mild sensory issues. (And you might be thinking, "he wasn't even 2 how could he really be that delayed", but imagine never hearing your baby make a noise other than crying or screaming, and that was Robert. There were no coos or babbling or anything of the sort. You could go hours without hearing a single sound from him.) 

A little later we began to realize that "the weird thing he was doing with his eye" was not normal and took him to see a pediatric ophthalmologist. Come to find out there isn't much to make noise about when you can't see. Glasses changed him. He went from being a silent, somewhat detached little boy to a boisterous, talkative, and fully engaged little boy. It was night and day and we were thrilled to see this new being emerge.

Now the language delay was basically gone, but there was still the speech problem. He talked all the time, but we rarely understood anything he said and that made life extremely frustrating for him. When he was born we noticed he was tongue-tied, but were told not to worry about it becasue it shouldn't cause any problems.  His speech therapist told us that is often true, but his tongue was worse than any she had ever seen and it WAS causing problems. So with her encouragement he had his tongue fixed. But fixing it didn't mean he would automatically be able to use it. It has taken many hours of therapy, but gradually, bit by bit, he has figured it out.

And now for the exciting part, at the beginning of the last school year he was evaluated and his speech delay was rated as "severe"

Last August he was rated as "high moderate" being only 3 pts away from "severe"

After Christmas break he was evaluated again. Today I got the results. His score went from 97 to 26. A "MILD" speech delay.  I am ecstatic! Robert would be ecstatic I'm sure, but he doesn't get what the big deal is. He just smiled at me and said, "Are we going home now?"

Oh man, I love that little boy!"