Tomorrow I have the day off, and I need one! Last night was nice, we made pancakes and popcorn and Esme and I played dollhouse for a while. There is probably nothing wrong, but I am looking into having a speech eval done for her with the school district, or, if they do not respond, someone else maybe at the University etc.
She is in a spurt again, picking up new phrases and saying many new things. However, she still relies on saying some words twice or more to get a single point across, or mixes up her word order in such a way only Daddy or I can understand what she means. We translate a lot for her. She usually does this with 'new' information, trying to explain something she saw or did before, or wants to do in the future etc. I think it partially has to do with excitement and not slowing down to think things through - but it worries me sometimes. I correct her when she uses the wrong word or the wrong combination, and sometimes it sticks and sometimes it doesn't. I'm probably just a mother hen. Usually I am worried over nothing big, and it passes in time. I did call the school district and their lady was out, will have to get up the courage again to call her on Friday.
new words she is putting into use : 'just', 'supposed to', 'suppose so', 'guess so', 'play WITH', 'go WITH' etc... she is using the connecting words a bit more often. She still mixes up pronouns like he/she and gender items like girl/boy but I think that might just be underexposure? She mixes up tenses often, like saying something is 'all falling' when she has found something fallen on the floor from weeks ago. She uses 'all (verb)' as a tense that I understand, but it sounds odd to the ears. "Daddy is all cleaning in the door in the kitchen" etc. She uses 'This the other one (noun)' to mean something is similar to another item she knows, with no context to what 'the other one' means etc. That is hard for non-family members to understand.
I had a little speech training in college in my linguistics classes... which doesn't help the mother hen. These few things I have noted make me want to hear from someone professional whether it is normal or may need attention. Mark said if I need reassurance, the school district speech program is not a bad place to start.
As a note: I had speech classes when I was young for several things. This happened after I started school, and I was teased often for the oddities. One of the problems that went beyond mere pronunciation problems was echoing questions and new information before I would respond to it. At one point I was called 'that little girl that says everything twice' by other children. I did work out of it, but still consciously remember being a five year old trying HARD not to do what had become a useful and 'necessary' habit. Although the odd patterns I am seeing are not exactly like this, my experience opens up the possibility that sometimes things are not the same for one as they are for their peers.
update: We have an appointment with the education speech therapist tomorrow for a 'brief evaluation.' I hope this will give us what we need!
1 comment:
For what it is worth -- Emily does a lot of the same things that it sounds like Esme is doing -- especially with mixing up tense. Emily gets tense wrong ALL the time.
Good luck!
Post a Comment