Speech Therapy

I've mentioned a few times that Livie doesn't really talk much - and that what she does say isn't really clear. It has been getting to the point where she has several major meltdowns every day because of her frustration at not being understood. We've been getting increasingly frustrated also because she has been less and less patient as we try to figure out what she's saying. So we finally decided to do some testing and see just how far behind she is and if we thought getting some speech therapy would be helpful.

First we talked to our doctor about it to see what he said. After a few questions and getting Livie to use a few of her words, he recommended we take her up to the hospital and get her tested through the speech therapy program up there.

A few days later we had an appointment with the speech pathologist at the hospital. After an hour-and-a-half appointment, we discovered that she was just barely below the average numbers for kids her age. The test the speech pathologist performed at the hospital said that 85-115 is the average range for kids Livie's age and she ranked at 84. After some looking, we discovered that our insurance wouldn't cover any speech therapy for her and the cost was supposedly pretty high {we don't know the actual cost - when the pathologist found out our insurance didn't cover anything she didn't want to tell us how much it was because she said it was so high}. She recommended us to a program called Infant Toddler. We discovered that if Livie qualified for their program, we would be able to get her some help without any out-of-pocket costs for us.

After several days and a few different phone calls, we got an appointment set up with them to do their test. When they do testing, they test for all the various things they help with, not just the issue you are looking for help with. So they performed all their tests and several days later we found out that Livie is right on track developmentally in every area except speech. She has a seven month delay in her expressive communication, which barely qualified her for their help {their cut-off delay is six months}.

Que a little more waiting and phone calls and we had our first appointment yesterday morning with the speech pathologist and a family service coordinator to decide what we were going to work on with Livie specifically. She was a little shy around the speech pathologist, but I think she'll warm up to him soon enough. We decided on some things to work on, most specifically getting her to express her wants to us, {particularly at meal times as that's when she has the most meltdowns}. We'll have our first official appointment working on her speech tomorrow. Here's to hoping we can get this little one to talk to us!