Nine Months Ago

After listening to Ava sing the Itsy Bitsy Butterfly, I found myself trying hard to remember what she was like before.

Ava - 21 months old - Childhood Apraxia of Speech before therapy

At 21 months of age, you want most typically developing children to have a spoken vocabulary of at least 10-24 words. By 24 months of age you want to see 50 spoken words and some two-word combinations. You also expect those words to contain almost all vowel sounds and a wide variety of consonants. You would expect a typical history of cooing, laughing, smiling, and babbling as an infant.

Ava did not have a typical history of cooing, laughing, smiling, and babbling as an infant. At 21 months she used no more than 4 different vowel sounds and 3-4 consonant sounds. Her spoken vocabulary at that time is well represented in this video I took one day (11-30-2010 to be exact) while we were reading a story before bed. She had about three words: "de" (that or there), "uh" (used in a variety of ways for emphasis), and "oh no".

I remember taking this video. It was after I had finally accepted that there was a problem and I needed to pursue getting Ava evaluated. I took the video thinking it might be helpful to show it to someone because I knew she often wouldn't "talk" at all in front of strangers. As it turned out, I never used the video for that purpose, but I wanted to share it now. It is a good representation of what Ava's expressive language looked like before we started intervention.