Speech Therapy

You know those children you can hear halfway across the grocery store screaming like a spoiled little brat, making you wonder what on earth their mother was thinking letting their child get away with despicable behavior like that? Yeah, that's me. And Cody's that unbelievingly shrill child. Almost every time we're out. And then all the time at home. We've been going through a frustrating year or so of trying to get him to pick up some words, just a few at the very least. But, despite our daily efforts, he's still pretty much wordless. In between his grunts and screams is mixed in some word-like sounds to attempt to say "mama," "no" and "dada." And he can roar like one crazy dinosaur. But that's it. And he'll be two next week. So this past week we paid a long-awaited visit (four months, to be exact) to the speech therapist. It was therapy for me to have someone listen to my frustrations, release me of my deep motherly guilt and observe my child for over an hour. There's not a whole lot we can do for him at this point, but she did give me some suggestions as to how to encourage his speech and, in the meantime, to teach him a little more sign language to encourage proper communication versus simply screaming to get what he wants. I love my little Codes, and it breaks my heart to see him so frustrated when he can't communicate. As a mom, I just want to see him happy and doing as well as he possibly can. So I hope these exercises work - and quickly - so we can start to hear about everything going on in that brain of his!