It's Offical...We Need Therapy

Well, not all of us do, just Nathan. His speech just isn't coming along. He says the d, b, and m sound with a combination of different a sounds (like ma, da, ba...you get it). He doesn't babble or jabber like most kids do. He is over 18 months now and still sounds like a monkey with all of his "ooo, ooo". He will make that sound when he needs something to eat or play with, wants to do something, needs help, and everything in between. He will point or lean along with it so it is a game of charades everyday to figure out what he wants. If any of you know me, I HATE charades. I am getting better at figuring out what his different "ooo"s mean and what he needs. I had a friend suggest I put in a referral and we had someone from the state come and evaluate him. She observed him and asked a million questions for her developmental assessment. She said his test came back normal, but since expressive and receptive language are lumped together in the same catagory in the test it didn't show the huge gap between them. So she still had the speech and language pathologist come to give her evaluation. She agreed that he is doing great with his receptive language skills as well as social skills, but that expressive is lacking a bit. We are going to take him in to have his hearing tested, even though he seems to be hearing and comprehending just about everything we say, just to be sure we don't overlook anything obvious. Then, on Thursday we will have a lady come and make up an Individual Family Plan. We'll see if we can get someone to come to our house to do speech therapy or if we need to take him somewhere to have it done and see how often he needs it. This will be great for him to be able to communicate without getting frustrated (he is starting to throw tantrums). He may just surprise us and start speaking out of the blue, but as for now, this is the best route we can think of. I see him as being so smart because he is so receptive and can understand so much of what I say, the problem is, no one else sees it since he walks around sounding like a monkey. I promise, he is smarter than he sounds!