Cheering for “Diesel”!

You might not realize how exciting it is to hear a two-and-a-half year old boy say the word “diesel”, but in our house clear pronunciation of the word is a reason to celebrate!

When our son started talking at what is considered a “normal” age, we were elated!  It was so exciting to hear the new words stumbling out his mouth.  But as he grew and his ability to speak did not improve as it should have, we became worried.  And he became frustrated!  So began a long road of hearing tests and careful monitoring on our part to attempt to determine just what the problem was.  After three auditory tests we were very pleased to learn that his hearing is perfectly fine.  A two-hour “play date” with a speech pathologist in December led to the final diagnosis: Drew has severe phonological disorder.  Basically, this means that there is a disconnect between his brain and his mouth and, though he can make all of the appropriate sounds, he can not get words to come out whole.  The first part of nearly every word in his vocabulary is missing, so “book” is “ook”, “cookie” is simply “ee”, etc.  For some unknown reason, words that are made up of a repeated consonant-vowel sound are no problem for him (ie. “baby” and “choo choo” have always been said with proper pronunciation).   Despite this, the problem leaves him nearly unintelligible.  The most difficult part of this problem is that he is not even aware of the fact that his words are incomplete and he grows very impatient and frustrated when he can’t get his message across.

However, the past week has given us hope!  We have heard two new words come out whole!  “Train” (which he previously referred to simply as “choo choo”) and “Diesel” (a character from Thomas and Friends) are the new words we are celebrating!  Speech therapy will begin, most likely, in April and as we wait for that date we hope to have many more small victories as we work with him ourselves!  We’ll be attending a parent session next week to learn better how to help him, and I’m eager to learn what more I can do.  I can’t wait to have clear conversations with him!