Speech Therapy

I’ll admit I was not on board with this from the beginning. I didn’t really think it was necessary. I just figured Tallie would start talking when she was ready and that it was not a big deal that at 18 months she had said only a few words. I was trying to be a “good mom” though and half heartedly went along with it. The first teacher that we were assigned to was very nice, but all of the things she wanted me to do seemed so forced and unnatural. I found it very hard to remember to do them when she wasn’t there. She wanted me to put a one word association with everything Tallie did or touched. So anytime she picked up a ball, I was supposed to look at her and say “ball”. If I was pushing her on the swing set, I was supposed to say “swing”. It was hard for me not to say, “Tallie, do you have a ball?” Or “Tallie is this fun swinging?” I had to try and use only one word instead of just talk to her like I normally would. I was also supposed to use the word “more” as a question and wait to get some type of response from Tallie before I could give her what she wanted. This was very hard to do. I do not like to see my kids cry and this activity made Tallie furious. How was I supposed to keep my cool knowing that I was upsetting my daughter, which by the way was unnecessary right? She would figure it out on her own eventually so why was I putting her and myself through this. So that’s when I decided to take the summer off.

At the end of the summer a different teacher called me and said she was assigned to my area now. So I reluctantly agreed to set up a time for her to come. I found that I connected with this lady a lot more than the first teacher and didn’t necessarily mind having her come over. She wasn’t as forceful as I felt the first teacher had been and she would constantly says how great and beautiful Tallie is, what mother doesn’t want to hear that about their child? She continued to come about every week or every other week until about a month after I found out I was pregnant. I was pretty sick and had to cancel on her quite a bit because I just didn’t feel up to having someone come over to my house. When I finally started feeling better we resumed our visits on a weekly or biweekly basis. About this time, I started thinking about Tallie and now that she was almost 2 ½, I started becoming a little concerned that she still wasn’t saying much. When all this started, I had thought for sure that by the time she was 2, I would see a big improvement. I talked to my mom about it and she also seemed a little concerned so I decided to mention it to her teacher. She almost sounded relieved that I had brought it up and she kind of blurted out that if I wanted we could re-test her for Autism. I was really surprised by this. I wasn’t saying that I was concerned that she was Autistic, hadn’t we already determined that she wasn’t? I was just concerned that her language was delayed. I decided to go along with a second evaluation, again just to rule it out.