YAY!

Once Katie turns 3, Early Childhood Intervention can't provide speech therapy for her any more. So we had to decide what to do. We could discontinue therapy altogether. We could go through the school district. We could see a private speech language pathologist.

For many stupid reasons, we chose to go the school district route.

It sucked.

They wanted to label my beautiful, sweet, smart little girl as 'disabled.' They wanted to put her in a special education preschool.

So I got on the phone and got her out of that FAST!

We met her new SLP today. Her name is Amy and she's great. She held Katie's attention, and Katie responded favorably to her. Amy showed Kate some pictures and tried to get her to say what the pictures were. Katie would say the name of the object, but often, only vowel sounds would come out. Amy asked if Kate had a lot of ear infections. My answer was: Who knows? That's part of the problem -- we don't know how long Katie couldn't hear. My oldest child, Kyle, had two ear infections as a baby, but I knew right away something was wrong with him. He had a fever, he was cranky, he wouldn't eat. Katie didn't act any differently.

Anyway, it went great and I can't wait for Katie to start therapy with Amy.

From the top...

My daughter Katie is almost 3.

She currently is undergoing speech therapy. At the age of 2.5, she could say exactly four words: "Mama," "Dada," "Da" (what she calls her brother), and "backpack" (thank you very much, Dora the Explorer).

At that point, we discovered that she COULDN'T HEAR, and that made actually TALKING pretty darned difficult. She got tubes in her ears and has received speech therapy through Early Childhood Intervention since August. Kate's vocabulary has grown to include "apple," "water," "SpongeBob," and the chorus to "Ruby Tuesday."

Can't wait to find out what is next...

She will be 3 on New Year's Eve (yes, in my future are millions of NYEs spent with a dozen giggling girls in my living room for slumber parties), and after much thought, my husband and I decided to switch to a private speech therapist for the remainder of her therapy. ECI doesn't offer services past the age of 3, and our other option was to receive therapy through the school district, which wasn't a very good option. But I'll get into that another day.