My son is now 41 months old. At two I could tell he was behind in speech but my ped said he was fine, at 2 1/2 he was still behind so I had his hearing tested (was fine) and had early intervention do an evaluation. They said his expressive language and receptive language was 35% delayed. (I have always felt he understood more than he expressed) At 3 on his exit they said he was still 25% on expressive and I believe it was about 19% on receptive. Since then he started receiving speech once a week from at our public school. He seems to be doing well. In everything else he is doing great. Physically I would actually say he is ahead of others his age. He is all boy, active, strong willed but nothing that really signals othe problems. He can have a very good attention span if it is soemthing that interests him. Current to me he seems to uderstand most everything. He will identify almost any object by flash card, says a lot of sentences like "I want ______" fill in the blank with what he is wanting. Where's ?, I'm Okay, Haley did it, give back it is mine. He has a lot of words that he will say if really wants something for instance the other day said "I can't reach it, lift me up". The problem was unless you have heard him a lot before you probalby wouldn't have understood. He answers yes no properly but if I would ask "what did you do today" he won't answer. He is finally getting close to be potty trained! : )

Okay now that I have done my best to explain his current situation what do you think? Our current speech teacher says he is doing good every week. Our old one always said she felt he would be caught up by the time he was in kindergarten (a little over two years). It's just hard for me because I have no way to tell if he is on track for catching up. I know noone else like him and have a hard time finding kids that are similar online. Like I said besides language he seems fine in every other way. Very social, loving, interacts with toys/kids properly. He can identify several letters, colors, letter sounds. Will sing ABC's (again he is hard to understand) sings fairly long songs (IE. Jesus loves the little children..)

OK I will stop rambling. Just looking for opinions or others going through the same thing.

My DS will be 4 at the end of May. He sounds similar to your son. We started speech with him at 22 months. At 35 months he was diagnosed with Mixed Expressive/Receptive Language Disorder by a Dev. Ped. They also mentioned some sensory issues and social immaturity. They assured us though that they believed that with a lot of hard work, he would catch up by Kindergarten. He is currently enrolled in the ECSE preschool. They attempted to label him as ASD, but since I had just gotten the Dev. Ped, ST, OT, Psych eval done the week prior, I chose to believe them. He is diagnosed with just a Developmental Delay for now and receives ST 2x and OT 1x a week for fine motor. He has come so far since a year ago, it is unbelievable. THat being said, he is still quite behind. He has a hard time paying attention and is still quite self directed. His speech has improved, but he still is unable to answer questions reliably. He makes choices between items and can answer a yes/no but forget about open ended "how was your day" questions. I have just a few times gotten concrete answers for "what did you have for lunch" type questions, so I really celebrate them when I get them. This is an obvious area of concern for us now. He has imaginative play, but does not cooperatively play with peers yet. He does play with his sister and with adults but has very few friends and most of their play together is physical.

He sounds a lot like your little boy. We are out there. We just started a play group with other boys (a mojority of our experience in the ST world is with boys) needing ST. It is one of the best things I have done for him.

Where are you located?

Michelle

I am in LaGrange Park. It is about 14 miles west of Chicago. Are you familiar with the area at all?

We went ahead with the ECE preschool primarily because he needed the attention. He is in daycare full time and while his teacher is very sweet, it is not her job to pay special attention to my son over the other children in her care. This way he goes a 1/2 day and is with 4 other boys with anywhere from 2 to 5 adults in the room (teacher, aide, ST, OT, PT) on any given day. That is a lot of 1 on 1 attention that he certainly isn't getting otherwise. It has taught him rules and has helped his impulsiveness immensly. His receptive language has increased incredibly this year too. He is following directions better and just gets it more - you can see it in his eyes. As I mentioned, he still has problems creating sentences to answer questions. He does tend to use some memorized phrases often, but he is using htem to communicate. he is constantly needing to "save" something. Save the animal, save me, we have to save my blankie....I think it is part of his age and the fact that every childs TV show is constantly saving someone/thing. Cracks me up actually.

I mentioned thescolialization/play group that we just started too. We are going to a facility in Downers Grove for that. It is a lot to pack into a day for my son, but I do think it will help him. Let me know if you are interested in the info and I will forward it on.

I am in the same boat as you with the day to day feeling roller coaster. Some days I am completly at peace with where he is, other days I feel like I could just crawl into a cave. Luckily, based on his progress this year, those days are less and less. His IEP meeting is coming up in the beginning of April, so I expect that to be a dark day. No matter how prepared you are, it is tough to go into a room and have a group of professionals tell you all the things that are wrong with you child.

Michele

Did anyone's son with sensory issues have a hard time talking at 2? my son was 2 in January and he is completely non verbal. He attempts to talk but his face tenses up and he does not move his tongue around to create any words. we just started working with an OT last Friday and she said he definately will benefit from OT on a weekly basis. Hopefully thr county will not deny him services...

Hi tkisloski,

I also hope that in addition to having occupational therapy that your son will also be working with a speech-language pathologist who is experienced and successful with working with young children and their parents. There are some great techniques for encouraging and shaping sound, syllable, and word imitation that may be beneficial to your son. Press the county Early Intervention program to assist you. Your son deserves to communicate.

Mary Lou

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Mary Lou B. Johnson, M.S.,CCC-SLP
http://www.helpyourchildspeak.com