Speech Therapy

Hallie began private speech therapy on Sunday. We consider ourselves very fortunate that our therapist was able to get approval to see her twice weekly for 12 weeks. Hopefully, she'll be able to extend this because it's really clear to us that this is not a problem that is going to go away in 12 weeks. Indeed, I suspect this will stretch on for years and, unfortunately, at this juncture point, it's unclear where or how this story is going to turn out.

In other words, the shoe that we always expected, appears to have dropped. Very quietly.

So, this is not a fun post to write. Normally I'm either an optimist or I am indignant and a fighter where Hallie is concerned. I'll do anything to get to the bottom of what's going on (figuring out the reflux puzzle, figuring out the allergy puzzle, not taking no for an answer or accepting easy fixes that specialists throw at you when I know my kid better than they do, etc etc). This talking puzzle, and to some extent, its corollary, the eating puzzle, have me stymied and dejected. I don't even know what to say anymore. How appropriate.

So therapy is very hard for Hallie. Talking is very hard for Hallie. That's what it boils down to. She is so clearly unable to make her mouth and lips work to make sounds, even when she knows those sounds and makes them in other contexts. For example, Hallie has begun to imitate the word "good" (sounds like "guh" or even just a glottal "g" stop sound) at home. If we say "good" (as in "good girl"), Hallie says "guh" almost every time. But when the therapist put her on a swing at the office and tried to get her to imitate "go" ('guh' would have been perfectly acceptable), Hallie simply and clearly could not do it. Over and over again. The second we said "good" she'd go "guh" and if we said "go" she'd look at us, and try to move her mouth, and nothing would come out. The good news about "go" is that we eventually managed to get "go" (guh again) out of her on the park swing last night after we both got home from work. And now we can probably go with it, so to speak, but this is so, so hard for Hal.

The word that had her so frustrated and broke our hearts was "ball." Balls are one of Hallie's favorite things but for some reason she cannot sign them and she cannot say "ball." She says "buh" for Big Bird, Bert, and Bubbles---they all sound the same and are just consonants, really, but we'll take that. But not for "ball." And the therapist would not give her a ball until she said and signed something and so over, and over again our little girl was upset, and frustrated, and at the end literally threw up her hands in the air and did not know what to do. We'll work on ball at home, too, and eventually she will get it. But this is so hard and our hearts are breaking.

I think it'll go like this for every word at this point, and they are not really words but mere approximations. And then we will need to fight to turn them from mere statements into modes of communication (nothing except Sesame Street functions that way yet). And then we will need to add vowels, and syllables and build language.

It's like teaching someone who had a massive stroke how to speak, I imagine. And not knowing if they ever will.

So we are just sad. We'll fight this, of course, no matter what it takes and we will get her to speak however best she can and communicate with us in whatever mode works, and love her, love her, love her throughout this process, but this morning, and last night, and the day before have been very hard.

On a positive note: we did have a four day vomit free streak (March 31-April 3) and yesterday was sans spew, too. So we are up to 30 days of no vomit this year, four of them being in April. May the streak go on!

Hallie in her Own Time (and in her Own Way)

This'll be fast because I'm supposed to be sleeping (yes, you guys hear that a lot). (EDIT: Blogger has been a nightmare with pictures, so this is anything but fast...indeed it took twelve hours to post this...I did sleep part of the time, though!)

So, after provoking huge amounts of anxiety in me about the 'no talking' thing, Hallie decided tonight to mix things up a bit. Again.

Tonight, she started practicing her 'b's again and repeatedly said "buh-buh" every time I pointed at Big Bird. She also said something that sounds a lot like "whassthat?" nearly all evening. And she tried to say "chair" (going over to her high chair). It came out like "chuh" but we'll take it. "It's Telly" (again, to Telly, on the television, naturally) came out very clear.

Is this proto-talking a phase? The not-talking a phase? Is she just not interested in telling us stuff one day, and interested the next? Much as we used to want to get into our wonderful old dog, Bailey's, head and find out what she was thinking about (we used to say to one another: 'boy I wish she could just talk to us for one day; I have so many questions to ask her'), we now feel the same way about Hallie (though want to communicate with her even more).

So, who knows? Like everything else, she seems to be doing things her way. Do they conform to typical development? Deviate from it? Who can say. All I know is that she'd be giving me a bunch of gray hairs if I didn't already have them!

And, because I've been a neglectful photo poster, I'm adding in the pics from this past weekend's concert.

This one is of a very cute Hannah and Adam.



In this one, Hallie is making her french-fry eating debut. Doesn't this look a lot like a normal lunch? We're not quite there yet, but we'll make it (although we did have a bit setback today when it was accidentally confirmed to us that Hallie is indeed cow-dairy intolerant. That seems to be at the root of a lot of upchucks in our past).



And in these two, Hallie is engaged in a very engrossing game of 'oh-no-peek-a-boo' with Adam and Hannah. She doesn't quite get that you cover your eyes in peek-a-boo (though she does use things like blankets to cover her head). Instead, she clasps her cheeks. Anyway, she thought this was hilarious and cracked up the entire time.




LATER: Since Blogger is being annoying, I guess I'll write more while I wait for the pics to finally post.

Anyway, Hallie had a super time at the concert and we were thrilled about the fries. And the mamas had a pretty great weekend, all totaled. Friday night's birthday dinner was FABULOUS (it was at a great new-ish restaurant called James that we'd been meaning to try but haven't had the opportunity to since we rarely go out anymore. The best part is that James, along with numerous other fine dining establishments, is located three blocks from our house. So, even though it was frigid out, we were able to walk. I love living in Philly for that reason.

Saturday's concert obviously rocked, and we got to spend time with our niece Megan who is getting help from Sharon on a school project.

And on Monday, Ellen (Hallie's first friend and nurse from the ICN) came over to babysit/spend time with Hal while we went out for Restaurant Week (to a very excellent place we'd been before, called Meritage. They have a great wine list, though we obviously did not choose from its very choicest offerings).

Fun With Super Diaper Grover

To continue a theme started earlier on today...



If you listen closely, you can hear Hallie say "Diaper" in this one!

Hallie's Antics

The past couple of days have been pretty fun ones for Miss Hallie Rose. On Thursday, her mommies went to Sharon's office holiday party (which was held at the spectacular National Constitution Center, which was designed not by Sharon's firm, but by Richard Cobb and I. M. Pei (who also did the pyramids attached to the Louvre Museum in Paris).



It was nice to do something grown-up (even if it was still work related) for a change, and Hallie got to spend some extra quality time with Ami, who reports that Hallie has the most fun in the bath of all the kids for whom she's ever had the pleasure to care.

Hallie missed us, however, and demanded an extra long bedtime ritual once we got home (around 10pm) and then was super cuddly/clingy all day yesterday. It makes us realize how little time she has spent alone from us, particularly at night. I think she's gotten used to Ami during the daytime, but the night time is family time around here.

Anyway, I know I've been remiss in posting pictures of Hallie lately; it's just gotten awfully hard to get a decent shot of our whirling dervish. Here's a good case in point:



Maybe next year Santa'll leave a D-SLR under the Chanukah Bush or something, but I suspect s/he has done his or her shopping already!

So what's new in Hallie's world:

1. Hallie''s really taken to 'feeding' herself the residuals of her applesauce (prilosec) snacks. She loves playing with the spoon and cup (and also with her Reglan syringe...Oye) and usually does a good job of getting the last dregs into her mouth:



I wish we had more tolerance for flung food and lost calories around here because we probably could teach Hallie to do real self feeding if we did!

And speaking of feeding, yesterday evening Karina started feeding Hallie some cheerios from her snack trap (Karina's, that is; Hallie doesn't have one yet since she doesn't snack conventionally). When I saw what was happening, I decided to let it keep happening. Hallie did well with the one-at-a-time snacks and chewed and swallowed just fine. I think it's a matter of how many she gets (at a time, but overall, too) and that in very small quantities she can handle these. She's certainly interested in solids. So we're beginning to experiment a bit (we gave her some fruit flavored cheerios before her dinner last night and she loved them. So did Karina, who kept begging for more 'naks' and who was thrilled to have them ruin her dinner).

2. Now that Hallie has pretty much mastered walking (and staying upright; given the amount of toddler debris around here, I am not sure how she's managed to avoid sliding and falling on books, stuffed animals, etc), she has, as predicted, begun to vocalize a whole lot more. Over the past week, we've heard the following words from Hallie:

diaper (pretty often and most often related to the actual object, which she'll bring over if you ask her to do so and she's not distracted by something else more compelling. She also does seem to use diaper to refer to Elmo, which makes sense since he is the main character on the Pampers Cruisers she wears).

book (a couple of times)

Big Bird (used pretty consistently and a main word for Hallie)

baby (though her pronunciation is a bit odd)

doggie (to refer to stuffed animal and live creature alike---Elisabeth and TJ's dog was a source of much fascination and some fear on Hallie's part the other night)

kittie (to refer to the live creature and kitties in books that she owns)

paper (she used this once for her speech therapist, who was thrilled since Hallie often refuses to talk at all for Jenny).

And on top of this, she is vocalizing a lot, greeting us with babbles, bringing toys over and babbling and the like. This obviously allays a lot of our fears about Hallie's speech delays, which do seem to be delays, but not indicative so much of a disorder.

But we are wondering this: what kind of kid's first word is diaper? What ever happened to 'mama'?

3. Hallie has proven herself to be her Mommy's daughter yet again: she's begun to climb in earnest. Not only has she mastered the fine art of getting up and down on and off the couch on her own, but she's taken this one step further: She has begun to scale the arms of the couch and threatened to jump into the pack and play. She has also tried to get over the back of the couch to see what's behind it (a lot of Hallie related junk is the answer to that question in case you're interested) and she's taken to climbing onto the table that's between the couch and the window. At first it was to get a hold of the answering machine and the phone, which Hallie finds very attractive. Then it was to get a better look at what was going on outside. And now she's figured out that she can STAND on the table and wave to her public, play peek a boo, and get an even better look at the television. Great!





And just to give you a sense of how big Hallie's getting, I'm including this picture, taken last April, of Hallie in the same Hanna Andersson sweater that she was wearing this morning.



You'll note that, this morning, the sweater is riding up over her belly and is pretty snug elsewhere. In April, it was HUGE on her. Wow. Time to start hitting E-bay for some more used high-end clothes in bigger sizes!