Helpful Mom

Did you know that speech therapy is provided by the state for free? When Katrina was young she took a looong time to speak, and when she did finally start talking it didn’t make a lot of sense. Not even to her parents who are home with her most of the time, so when she got to be about 3 years old that is when we started to get a bit concerned. Before that we kind of wondered if there was a problem but figured that some kids are just slow talkers and she’d eventually get it. Fortunately when bringing the concern to our Dr. attention he referred us to our local school system who promptly called us back and got the ball rolling to set up the necessary testing needed to evaluate if she had a problem or not.

Testing? It sounded scary to me and wasn’t sure how they were going to make my 3 year old take tests. But it turned out that Katrina loved it, couldn’t wait for the next tester to come play with her. And that’s exactly what they did, play with her. They came with toys and books, and activities to engage her and get her to say certain words so that they could see what problems she may have. They tested 3 different areas in case it was more than a speech problem. Physical abilities were tested to make sure she was capable of the skills a child her age should be able to do, mental abilities for understanding and cognitive abilities, and speech issues. It turned out she was only making intelligible words 30% of the time, the tester said it was like she had made up her own language. She had an arched tongue that would get tired, so she would start a sentence making sense but end up saying nonsense words because her tongue was tired.

So what to do? Turns out testing and therapy is totally free through the state as part of the No Child Left Behind grants. So not only did they evaluate her for free, coming to our house, on our schedule to do it. But they also arranged speech therapy on our schedule at our home! Do to her age and her abilities they scheduled a wonderful lady, Carrie, to come to our home twice a week for a half hour to work with Katrina. She started out by doing a bit of her own evaluation so she knew where to begin and then took it from there. I think, or maybe it felt like, that for the first year all they worked on was the letter F sound, getting Katrina to play games like Go Fish to get her say the Ffff sound over and over. Watch my mouth, see how I say F. Lots of books and games that would get Katrina to speak and practice saying the sounds. It was amazing how that little time a few times a week made such a huge difference.

It wasn’t overnight, more like over a year a half before she was a talking machine. She loved Ms. Carrie, both girls did actually. Mikayla would get up in Carrie’s lap and both girls would play games with her while I watched and learned while doing the dishes. And I enjoyed that time talking with Carrie too and was sad to see that time come to an end. But I can never thank Ms. Carrie enough for the gift she gave my child, restored speech.