Hair

I've been having fun fixing Ava's hair for school. I bribe her to sit still with a little tv in the morning and we end up with a cute hair style that will last through nap and still look nice in the evening. It also keeps the hair back off her face.

She has very fine, thin hair though, and so finding hairstyles that will work has been challenging. Did you know there are entire blogs devoted to little girl hairstyles? I found one that has hairstyles that work for Ava and I've been doing a different one each day to try them out. I don't always get a picture, but here are a few we've tried since school started a couple of weeks ago.

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Welcome to September and enjoy your holiday weekend!

The Weekly Review: Week 75

SLP Preview of the Week

Stay tuned. Next week I'll be telling you all about a set of /s/ resources that I've been working on putting in printable ebook format. The rough draft is completely done except for a cover. I'll be asking for volunteer proofreaders and some other feedback next week.

Ava this Week

Ava is discovering movement. The other three members of her family are drawn towards somewhat sedentary pursuits. We like to read, play computer games, build with legos or other construction toys, sew, do art projects, etc. Lately, it is becoming apparent to me that Ava likes all of those things, but she is drawn towards active pursuits as well. She wants to kick a ball, bop a balloon, play ping pong (she can actually serve a ping pong ball - she's only 3), swing a bat, climb a climbing wall, run as fast as she can, and slide over and over. She loves the activity and the movement. I need to find a way to build more active activities into our schedule. It fights against my nature and inclination a little, but she's worth it. And the activity would be good for all of us anyway.

Weekly Michael

Michael, as a contrast to his sister, has completely fallen in addictive love with his first real computer game. His father installed a game called Minecraft on his computer. It is an open-ended building game that involves placing a wide variety of cubes into a 3-D environment. There are landscape blocks (grass, dirt, bricks, trees, glass, lava, snow, etc), industrial blocks (dynamite, levers, buttons, train tracks, etc), and animals and people. He loves it. It is the last thing he thinks about before bed and the first thing he thinks about in the morning. He wants to know if the day is a "home" day or a "school" day primarily because he wants to know if he's going to get to play his game. As a parent of a preschooler I'm somewhat terrified of the addictive power of the computer screen. As someone who has had her fair share of gaming addictions, I'm enjoying watching him find his first gaming love.

Weekly Weight Loss

This week I'm up 0.7. It was hard to maintain the calorie tracking with guests in town. I also think last week weigh-in registered a little low and this week is registering a little high. C'est la vie. Next week is a new week.

Last Week's Special Event

We had an amazing visit with my in-laws. The children are in love. Grandma played ping pong and "bat the ball" with Ava every time she asked. Grandpa pretended to be a bear and chased giggling children all over the back yard.

The highlight of the visit was a trip to an extraordinary children's museum here in town that is essentially an indoor/outdoor playground created from recycled stuff for adults and children to play in together. They take donations from all kinds of companies and turn ordinary things into an extraordinary playground. They have a bus hanging half off their roof and you can climb into it (we did). They have airplanes suspended around a courtyard connected by wire tunnels and you climb around from one to another. They have castle turrets and a maze of concrete tunnels, slides, and stairs under the floor of one of the rooms. It is a place where you can explore, push boundaries of fear a little, and get a ton of amazing exercise. My fitbit told me I had climbed the equivalent of 31 flights of stairs by the time we left. I didn't take many pictures because I was too busy chasing children into scary places. Here's one I caught of my husband, son, and a friend at the top of a wire tower (at least three stories up) and another a friend caught of me following her daughter and my children up one of those wire tunnels to an airplane. I wish I had more. The place is amazing.

Data and Diagnosis

Let's take some snapshots.

Ava just shy of two years old. No words. Three consonants and one vowel in her phonemic inventory. Not able to imitate. History of reduced babbling. Lots of red flags for Childhood Apraxia of Speech.

Ava at three. Decent phonetic inventory. Speaking in multi-word sentences. Significantly reduced intelligibility. Exhibiting many age inappropriate phonological processes. Diagnosis would look a lot like a phonological processing disorder with a motor-planning (apraxic) component.

Ava at 3 1/2. Intelligibility is improving. Many phonological processes are resolving - even the ones that are still age appropriate (cluster reduction, stopping of stridents, etc.). It would be difficult to describe Ava's speech problems as a phonological processing disorder at this point. She has numerous speech errors which are resistant to intervention due to the underlying motor planning component (stubborn, stubborn velars).

Same kid. Same neurology. The "diagnosis" looks different at different points. We get so hung up on a label. We need them for insurance and schools. Parents and SLP's tend to like them too. It is more important to understand the characteristics of the speech at that point in time and to have a plan to remediate the current spectrum of problems. Then you have to periodically re-evaluate with an open mind and be responsive to change.

Fascinating stuff.

(Typically, you'd never administrate the same instrument three times in five months. In this particular case it was done because of the timing of Ava's IEP. They assessed her at intake, at the end of the school year, and then at the beginning of this school year. The results are not simply an artifact of retesting though. She has indeed made progress in the areas noted. It's pretty amazing actually.)