Speech update

Malcolm's speech therapist asked her technician to gather pictorial representations of all of the signs that Malcolm knows, so that we could provide it to his daycare teachers for them to use as a reference. We received it in the mail and I had to replace a few of them, as they were not accurate representations of the way we do the sign (there are often several versions of the same sign in ASL). I was able to find most of the ones I needed online. I decided to count them at the end and was shocked to discover that there are 65 signs in the booklet - plus there are about a dozen that are missing and need to be added. So my baby boy know signs for about 80 words. I was stunned - I had not counted his signs in a long time and was estimating that he knew maybe 40! The most amazing thing of all is that means that I also know 80 signs - unbelievable.

Malcolm will now say "baa" when he sees a sheep. He also tries to say other animal sounds like, moo, quack, oink, cluck, woof and meow with varying degrees of success. He loves to sing "ee-eye-ee-eye-oh" or something that sounds very much like it (you can guess his favourite song!). He says "Dah" every time he sees his Daddy and sometimes says "Duh" for Donovan. In August he said "Dah...Dee" for the very first time and has said it a couple of times since. He babbles a lot and likes to make sound effects like growling for a bear, roaring for a dinosaur and vrooming for a car.

So his verbal speech is slowly, slowly, slowly coming. Is this "typical" for kids with Ds? I have read, and been told, that kids with Ds are often 4 years old before their speech really takes off. But I have also seen and read about quite a number of kids with Ds whose verbal speech develops well before that - some are saying words before they are 2 years old, just like typical kids. And I have seen the huge variation in adults with Ds - those that can speak almost as well as you or I, those who can speak but have great difficulty in shaping their words so have limited verbal communication, and those who can hardly speak at all. We continue to hope for the best - that at age 4 his speech will magically take off and in no time he will be chatting away, and we will smile and roll our eyes and wonder why we ever worried about it...but more realistically I think his speech will continue to develop at a very slow rate and he will always have challenges in this department. It will be a work in progress for a good many years, possibly his whole life.

In the meantime, we will have a lot of fun singing Old McDonald had a farm....

Mary Ellen