Peanut has made amazing strides in his speech abilities in the last 6 months. His ever expanding vocabulary is hard to keep up with and helping him properly motor plan sentences is such a joy as they get more and more complicated. (To read about what Peanut struggles with click here for more:)
Most recently we have been working on the phrase "How are you?". He has motor-planned "What are you?" and his peers don't understand what he is trying to ask them. A lot of what we are working on now is to help him be more understood by his peers and strangers. We play games where every time he catches a ball he yells the word "how". The only way he can properly get all 3 words together is to clap his hands with each word and even then most of the time it comes out "What are you" or "How what are you" or "You are how what". He usually laughs it off but I can see the frustration in his eyes. If I ask him to try it again and he is past the point of frustration he will yell " I said it Mama, I said it" and that is when I know to back off.
Yesterday he had his speech therapy session where we continued to work on that and other mixed plane words and then we rushed home so that he could skype with the speech therapist that he will work with at the intensive speech therapy camp over the summer. When I asked him to tell her what word we were working on he stilled, concentrating so thoroughly that I felt his whole body tense and then he said so slowly "How.....are.......you?" It was said at the speed of someone trying to repeat a difficult foreign language that they had never heard before. The second the words were all out of his mouth he lit up, squirmed and my lap. I am so proud of him, but more than that I love the pride he has in his own accomplishments.
How am I? I'm great!
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