Morgan has been HILARIOUS lately. Most of what comes out of her mouth makes us laugh. And then I have to share it with friends and family via text. Most of my friends have kids so they understand how funny it is to listen to a toddler talk; but not many people understand how much it means to Michael and me that we are able to have conversations with our kid and understand most of what she says. Last summer when she was 2 & 1/2 she was barely talking. We started working with Ohio's program called Help Me Grow where a few teams of specialists came to our home to evaluate Morgan. They recommended speech therapy and occupational therapy for her texture issues. Her fine motor skills were rating 6 months ahead, but her verbal skills were 6 months behind.
I always joked that her speech delay didn't bother me; I honestly enjoyed not having a 2 year old chirping in my ear all day long, but I knew it wasn't 'right.'
She did 'talk' ...sort of. One of my brothers described her as sounding like Adam Sandler when he's doing one of his crazy voices...'shaba-doo?' The speech specialists asked if her speech delay seemed to bring on tantrums out of frustration. Nope. Morgan threw tantrums all right; but not over the fact that she wasn't communicating with us. She honestly didn't care.
We decided to skip speech therapy until she turned 3. We wanted to wait it out and see what happened if we gave her more time. I also worried that speech therapy would do the opposite for Morgan; whenever she's pushed, you get the opposite results. We've had major issues over food and potty. She very stubborn, and as her pediatrician said, at her age the only thing in life that she can control is what goes in and what comes out.
Since last summer, Morgan's speech has improved so much. Her vocabulary increases every day. She's still hard to understand sometimes, especially to people that aren't around her very often. And when you put her on the spot with questions, she freezes and can't answer. It's not that she's shy (she's not at all) but she has a touch of dysnomia, which is a problem with word retrieval. Chances are she will probably grow out of it.
Michael and I do work with her constantly. Her speech delay has been frustrating. It's almost impossible to potty train a toddler that can't communicate, so we're stuck with a 3 year old that's 3/4 potty trained while we're still sinking money into size 5 and 6 diapers and pullups. And she can't express her feelings very well. She can't tell us when she's sick or why she's sad or scared. She just cries and we get to play the guessing game of what's wrong with our kid. That is getting a lot better....now she will run crying to her room, then return to tell us 'I crying. I ran to my room. I'm sad.' Ummmm...okay, but WHY?!!!!! And she loves to go to the doctor so she will lie about her ears and tummy and foot hurting, so we never know if something is actually wrong until she runs a fever. Some of our friends little ones can not only explain 'my head hurts' but they add 'I need medicine.'
Wow.
That's cool I guess, but it's not my Morgan.
She might be frustrating. She might have a speech delay. But she's our girl. She's so funny and has so much personality I couldn't imagine her being any different.
On Sunday I was cooking mac n cheese for her lunch and she kept bossing me around, trying to hurry it up, so I said 'Morgan stop being so bossy!' to which she replied 'but mommy, how do I stop?' and I laughed.
Yesterday (Monday) she was standing on a chair waiting for me to fix her peanut butter on wheat sandwich and she said 'mommy my booty is sticking out' so I said 'why is it sticking out?' to which she replied 'because it's so big!' and I laughed.
She will start preschool in the fall and hopefully being around the other kids will help her speech development (can't wait to see what new words she learns....) and will hopefully make her explore new food options (peer pressure eating....hahaha). If by 4 she still has a delay, we'll do therapy and get this worked on before she starts Kindergarten.
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