Saturday, January 7, 2012

Truman's Sounds

I know I still owe everyone a Christmas post, and I promise I am working on it! In the mean time, however, I wanted to share a video we took this morning. As you all know, Truman has been receiving speech/language services for about 4 months now. As we've been delving deeper and deeper into therapy, I started to feel like Truman might have Apraxia, which is a motor planning disorder that makes it difficult for a person to link the area of the brain responsible for coming up with speech sounds with the muscles needed to execute said sounds. We thought this because every time we would ask Truman to make a sound, he would look at us long and hard and you could see him trying to process it, but then he really struggled to make the correct sound, even if we knew he was able to make that sound in other contexts. So we brought this theory to our speech pathologist. She said that while he's too young to diagnosis with such a disorder, she was on board that this could definitely be a factor in Truman's delays. She then recommended a supplement that is supposed to help with neuropathways. While I'm not super into herbal medicine, we figured it wouldn't hurt to try (and our doctor saw no problem with the medicine, as it's really just vitamin supplements). After a month of this supplement, combined with many hours of practice and patience, Truman is making sooooo much progress! We are so proud and excited for our little guy, and wanted to share this video. Look how quickly he knows which sounds to make :-)