Speech

Or as I like to call it "Asa Speak". My little boy is doing awesome. He is picking up words left and right and working really hard on trying to sound them out. You have to listen very carefully, but you can make out what he's saying. Like this morning when he woke up he opened his bedroom door and Frankie and Fraser were right there to greet him, of course being bulldogs they bulled right through him and went into his bedroom. Asa's room is a favorite of the dogs. So they went right in and made themselves at home, Mr. Asa was not happy about this and sternly proclaimed "GHHHA!" (GET). Repeatably he tried to make his point, but as they do with the older human pack members, they weren't listening.

As most of you know and some may not, children with Down syndrome typically learn to speak much later then typical kids, Asa will be 4 in June. Much of this is due to low muscle tone and forming the words, this is Asa's biggest struggle. Sometimes a child may have Apraxia of Speech, in this case the process of of the word from the brain to the mouth gets mixed up and it is much harder for kids to form front to back and back to front sounding words. With hard work with a PROMPT (Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets) Speech Therapist this can help the "process" or "programming".

Asa has been signing since he was 10 months old, and spoke his first words around a year which were hat and light, go figure. It has been a slow process for him, bursts here and there. We are in a burst moment right now. We are also very grateful for our Auntie (Brian's sister Steph) who is an SLP, she bought us Baby Signing Times for our 1st Christmas and we've been signing ever since! In addition to Baby Signing Time 1 and 2 we have Signing Time 1 through 6. This is the best learning system for ASL because you learn right along with your kids and it is fun!

So as our vocabulary builds here are some of Asa's words. Doe instead of go, dumb instead of come, eeha instead of here, dips instead of chips, boo instead of blue. We've also got, ankie instead of Frankie, he's good with Russ, but can't get any form of Fraser out. Waddy instead of water, oose instead of juice, but you get my point, he's trying! And he's communicating which is awesome. In the mornings he always says bye to Russ, the other morning when we were leaving the house it turned into "bye Russ see-oou-ader". The see you later part was all one word, I was explaining this to his SLP (not auntie BTW) and she said that was totally fine because it is one word to him right now, he's repeating what he's hearing and that is great...

Be still my heart... Love my Pooka Poo...