Gavin has speech therapy every Tuesday. I pick him up from daycare at 2:30 to get to our appointment and then afterwards I have a couple of hours to spend one-on-one time with him while Alexa and Tysen are still at daycare. I always utilize that time to focus on speech and apply some new tips that I learned during his therapy. Today after his appointment, it was so beautiful that I took him to the park. I've never taken just Gavin to the park so he was loving all the attention! It was a great place to practice some of the short phrases that we are working on, too. While on the swing, I got him saying, "Up and down! Up and down!"
We also saw some geese nearby so we practiced some animal sounds. He's great at saying, "Honk! Honk!" but the word "geese" comes out sounding like "gee."
We also practiced counting. There were 6 geese near us.
He loves climbing and he is not afraid of anything!
Tuesdays appointment was the eighth visit with our Children's speech therapist. The next two visits our therapist will be repeating the speech evaluation that Gavin did in March. Gavin will be given a score that we can compare to the last result so we can assess how much progress he's made. I know he's making progress. That makes me very happy. But he still has a long ways to go before he's caught up with peers his same age. His therapist is almost certain that Gavin's speech delay is a result of his history of ear problems. Gavin had almost constant ear infections until he was 14 months old and then he had surgery to have drainage tubes placed. Because he wasn't hearing during such a critical developmental period, it's not surprising that he's so delayed. It's because of these struggles with Gavin that I am so concerned about Tysen's hearing. We are seeing firsthand how hearing loss can negatively affect a child's development.
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