A Question You Don't Want Your Son to Ask His Preschool Teacher

We were sitting down to breakfast yesterday when Michael announced that when he grows up he wants to design a huge gun to blast tires in a junkyard. After a moment when my brain simply stalled attempting to formulate an appropriate response, I tried the following: "Well, actually, they usually recycle old tires into things like rubber mats and playground mulch like we saw on that show How Things Are Made. Perhaps you could design a huge tire recycling machine when you grow up?" After a millisecond of thought he rejected that idea. "No, I'll just design a really big gun."

Umm. Okay. I obviously needed a new strategy. "Well sweetheart. You can be anything you want to be when you grow up. You can learn all kinds of things at school." He perked right up at that suggestion and happily told me, "Great! I'll ask Miss Marlene to teach me to make a big gun at preschool tomorrow." At that point there was a huge awkward pause while I contemplated exactly the extent to which that strategy had backfired. Finally I stuttered, "No, don't ask Miss Marlene that..." and kind of trailed off. He came right back with, "Why not?"

Alrighty then... I launched into a huge discussion about how first you go through preschool where you learn letters and art and science and then grade school and high school where you learn reading and math and science and history and art and music.... And then, I explained, when you get to college you can choose to study what you want to be when you grow up. I told him that mommy learned how to be a teacher and a speech teacher. Daddy studied computers. Grandpa studied chemistry. His grandmother learned how to be a nurse. I then suggested that he could study to be an engineer who makes prototypes and plans for things to be built in factories.

At that point, I'm pretty sure he had stopped paying attention. Hopefully the huge long conversation will at least have distracted him from his original intention of asking his preschool teacher to teach him how to build a gun. A mama can hope, right?

Sometimes It's Just Normal

In retrospect, it is so clear that even as infants my children were not developing typical early communication milestones. The first smiles and laughs were not on schedule. We never really had cooing at all. Babbling was both very late and extremely reduced. This is for both children, not just Ava. In fact, all of those delays were even more extreme and exaggerated for Michael than for Ava.

Now Michael's speech started to kick in around the age of 15 months. It was odd. His first consonants were ones like /k/. He was using clicks in place of consonant sounds which was even more strange. I was so very worried.

In fact, I can remember having a conversation the night of Ava's birth with a fellow SLP about how concerned I was about Michael's speech. He was 15 and 1/2 months old that night. I know that it sounds strange that I just happened to be talking to a SLP on the night of my daughter's birth. However, that SLP was a close friend and former coworker who also happened to be a doula. She was my doula and with me for the birth of both of my children and so it was natural for us to be discussing Michael. She was there for his birth and she was a fellow SLP.

At 15 months all Michael had was a couple of vowels, a /k/, and a lot of clicks. However, by 24 months he was talking in 5 word sentences, had an age appropriate sound repertoire, and was intelligible enough that his speech was constantly commented on positively by strangers. It was such a relief. Over the course of those nine months, the worry I had carried in my heart for the first year and a half of his life faded and I was so grateful to let it go.

That history of Michael's delay followed by a remarkable recovery to above average was a huge part of why I delayed so long before acknowledging that Ava's speech was delayed. Then we fast-forward to the present day.

Now, at the age of 4, it is apparent that Michael does have some speech errors that are going to need intervention. He has a distorted interdental production of /s/, /f/, /v/, and /th/ that results in all of those sounds being produced in an identical fashion that is visually distracting and impacts his intelligibility on words that include those sounds. And so I worry.

I spend a lot of time worrying about speech. I worry about Ava's speech. I worry about Michael's speech. But sometimes, a speech error is completely normal - even adorable. Michael is completely convinced that one of his favorite foods is "grabioli" rather than "ravioli". I smile a little every time I hear him say that because it is such a normal speech error. I smile, and gently correct him. It is nice to occasionally engage in a correction that is without stress or subtext. Because sometimes it really is just normal.

Help me tell a story. - A Speech Card Set Activity

I had 15 cards left over from my Initial /s/ card set after making some top-bottom puzzles yesterday. I was trying to think of an activity to do with the remaining cards.

I decided to try to come up with a story to tell about the cards. I told the story and paused to let Ava fill in the words prompted by the appropriate cards during the storytelling. The story is pretty silly, but it works fairly well given it was just made up to include 15 random initial /s/ words.

Here are the words I was trying to include: suck, seed, saw, soup, soap, sock, sick, seek, seal, sack, soil, side, sell, sub, and same.

Here is the story I used. It isn't exactly great fiction, but it includes all the words and Ava thought making up a story was fun. I thought of the story ahead of time and put the cards in the order they would appear in the story. Then, I just told the story off the top of my head as prompted by the cards.

Mommy was trying to suck some juice out of her juice box. It was all empty though. She decided to make some more from this watermelon. First she had to take out this seed and all the others. She was having some trouble so she cut it with a saw. Then she made her juice and drank all of it. When she was done she was still hungry so she decided to eat some soup. Her hands were all sticky from the watermelon, so first she had to wash her hands with some soap. Mommy didn't have a towel, so she dried her hands on a sock. How silly! Then she ate her soup. After she finished all her soup, she felt a little sick so she laid down and took a nap. After her nap she decided to go for a walk. While she was on her walk she saw some children playing hide and seek. She walked by the zoo and saw a mama seal and a baby seal. She saw a sack full of soil that had fallen on its side. All the soil fell out and made a big mess. Then mommy saw a man trying to sell a hot dog and realized that all that walking had made her hungry so she bought one and ate it. Next she walked by the lake and was surprised to see a sub. Finally, mommy decided it was time to go home. She was thirsty, so she went back to the same table to drink some more juice. The end.

Ava enjoyed the story and being able to help out by adding words to my story. I'd pretend that I had forgotten the next part of the story and she was helping me by telling me the word on the card.

Again, this isn't the most intense type of articulation drill, but taking five minutes out of a session to do this type of activity works on language skills, and teaches a story that you can use later to work on generalization to the phrase or sentence level. You could do this type of activity with any of the card sets.