Apraxia

A.P.R.A.X.I.A. Apraxia. It's a good Scrabble word.

This has been a busy week for us, filled mainly by a plethora of doctor visits. Today's was to the speech pathologist at the hospital for an evaluation of Buddy. We had him in speech therapy for about 5 months last year and then lost ST when the therapist quit First Steps. A developmental therapist has been coming since September but she works more on helping him communicate with signs than getting him to actually form words.

I set up the evaluation at the hospital because I've heard they have a fairly intensive program that helps kids with a variety of speech and language pathologies. Although he has about 10-15 signs that he uses and has recently started saying "ma ma" and "da da," I want to be sure we're doing everything we can for him and that something other than the known speech delays with WS isn't also hindering his expressive language abilities.

The speech pathologist was very kind and thorough. She spent about 1.5 hours playing with Buddy, asking questions and jotting down notes on her intake form. She'll be sending us her report in a few weeks. At the end, she said that based on what she has seen, it's possible that Kieran has a form of developmental speech apraxia. The good news is that there are several STs at the hospital who specialize in treating apraxia. So now we wait to see if our insurance will cover the therapy and for a therapist to have an opening in her schedule.

I'm very thankful that we live nearby such a good hospital and have so many services available to us.