Friday, October 22, 2010

Speech Therapy

Madison saw a speech therapist today, which will probably lead to more visits because that's what happens when you visit any therapist. But our main concern is getting her caught up with actually saying the words, as her understanding of vocabulary is very good. Essentially, she drops the first parts of a lot of words as she tries to communicate. While this is cute, the current trend in our house is to encourage those first parts to be as clearly pronounced as we can get them. This has mixed results, but with a little effort, we've been pleased.

For example, Daddy got Madison to say the word "baby" by closing her lips together at the beginning and middle of the word. Until now, it's been "dady," which would could understand - but wasn't exactly the word. Our communication has often been like that with Madison, a pattern of correct guesses that further the conversation.

So small successes have been noted, but we knew that Madison also would need to see a speech therapist - as would we. Our intentions are to learn and do exercises with her so that we can get her completely caught up with the other children her age who've had a head start on learning this English thing. Madison's only been learning English about two years, where her counterparts have had four, so she needs to catch up a little more before school starts.

While on one hand, the thought of our daughter needing to go to any sort of therapy is dreadful, it's not entirely unusual - and certainly a bit less worrisome when you consider that she's an adopted girl just learning a new language. I mean, how many years have I been trying to learn Spanish without any success? I should see a Spanish therapist!

The word "apraxia" was thrown around a few times, but the therapist doesn't have anything conclusive to suggest that Madison actually has this: she's behind in every area when it comes to speaking, and it is hard to isolate anything at the moment.

But the therapy should help her get caught up. It's just another class for her: add that to music class, and the ballet class we hope to get her hooked up with soon - and maybe the martial arts class that Daddy wants her to sign up for.

An idea just occurred to me: why not combine some of these classes? Just imagine how fun speech therapy could be if you added a little martial arts!