Last Day of Speech

Yesterday, Nolan had his last in-home speech therapy session with Miss Andi. Andrea has been coming to our home twice a month since July to work with Nolan and it was bittersweet that yesterday was her last visit. The progress that he has made in the last 10 months has been nothing short of a miracle.

When Nolan turned two last May, he had a vocabulary of five functional words and there were days that he would not even say those. Most of our interactions were spent with him breaking down into a tantrum while I tried to figure out what he wanted. To say that there was a lot of tension is an understatement. I am a teacher by training and I could not help my child learn to speak. The frustration and guilt that I felt from my inadequacies are hard to describe. All kinds of things went through my head....autism, hearing loss, emotional and/or learning disorders...

At his 24 month check-up, the pediatrician finally agreed that Nolan's language development was significantly delayed (something I had known since he was about 15 months old). Although I already knew Nolan was delayed, there was something about the official diagnosis that was hard for me to process. Due to the fact that Nolan only had speech delays, the doctor felt we could rule out autism, but hearing loss was still a possibility. Fortunately, two extensive rounds of tests conducted last summer indicated that he has normal hearing function.

In September, on the recommendation of the pediatrician and the audiologist, we enrolled Nolan into the same preschool that Laiken and Carson had attended. I had intended to keep him home with me one more year, but the doctors felt like it might help jump start Nolan's speech. I often wondered during that first month of school what kind of mother left her child in a strange situation with no ability to verbalize what he needed or wanted and no ability to tell me what had happened while he was away from me. The guilt ran high and there were days, amidst his tears and tantrums, that I almost took him back home with me.

By mid-October, we began to see a shift. Nolan became comfortable with Andi and looked forward to her visits. He was crying much less on school mornings and his teacher was indicating that his participation in class had increased. And, miraculously, he was finally developing a vocabulary and creating sentences. His speech was very robot-like, as if he was startled by and unsure of his own voice, but the verbal ability was there. Almost overnight, he could name things all over the house and ask for what he wanted. A month or so later, he was able to tell stories of what had happened during his day, he asked for certain things for Christmas, and he began singing. The progression since then has been like a flood-gate opening: all of the talking, singing, rhyming, and babbling that had been bottled up for over two years just started spilling out and hasn't quit since.

No one could ever explain to us why Nolan took so long to talk. Doctors and specialists used the all-encompassing, "Well, he's a boy and sometimes they just take longer..." excuse. That explanation was like nails on a chalkboard to me. I wanted to understand what was happening to my child and how to fix it. Blaming his condition on his gender seemed inappropriate and artificial. Nolan turns 3 on Saturday and by all indications, he is a typically-developing child. He astounds us now with his vocabulary. His memory and observation skills are eerily keen. He makes unusual comparisons that surprise us and he has this great sense of humor that keeps us laughing all the time. He is a little spoiled, very stubborn, and extremely active, and thankfully, I can hardly remember a time when he couldn't talk to us.