Getting better all the time

Going through the hat drawer.

Gabriel's speech is improving by the hour.  What everyone told me would happen did - once he started, the floodgates opened and words just started pouring out.  But his pronunciation isn't that great.  I'm really the only one who can consistently understand him, and even I need to have help with finger pointing and context sometimes.  For example, this is what it sounds like when he counts to ten:

un

boo

beesh

dooower

bibe

shish

memen

aash

mine

and he hasn't quite got 10 yet other than a mumble.

We are still having biweekly visits with our Early Childhood Intervention representative (LaToya), and my pediatrician's office finally came through for a speech therapist's referral.  We went to the evaluation last week at a Cook's Children's satellite office. Gabriel was in the 3-year-old range for words he recognizes and is almost in the normal "expressive words" range for his age, but the therapist was concerned at the lack of consonants he knows and continually misuses.  She thought he would greatly benefit from three months of once-a-week therapy sessions.  

I really didn't expect this.  I thought he'd come such a long way in such a short time that maybe we dodged having to do any therapy.  But we want whatever is best for him, so we agreed to be put on the 2-3 MONTH waiting list.  In the meantime, I called LaToya to see if there was any way he could be evaluated by one of their speech therapists.  She had been running into bureaucratic walls in getting someone to see us, but made a bunch of phone calls and we now have an evaluation scheduled for Wednesday afternoon.  This really isn't the best time for it since he will have been at Mother's Day Out all day and will be tired, but I had to take what I could get to get this show on the road.  So I will have to decide between waiting for the Cook's therapy (which is reputed to be extremely good), and the ECI therapy, which I'm just not sure about but at least he'd get it when he seems to really need it.  

Parenting is all about making tenuous decisions that could forever affect your child's life down the road.  That's why I think people should have to take some sort of test to even begin the journey.