Kate's Speech

This girl continues to amaze me as her speech progresses. Recently her speech was evaluated and compared to her evaluation six months ago. Both her receptive language (what she understands) and her expressive language (basically what she is trying to express) has risen in leaps and bounds. In her receptive skills she is even above her age level now, which is awesome. I actually attribute a lot of that to her sign language skills. I don't think she would've picked up on language so quickly if we weren't all signing with her. I am kind of sad that we aren't learning as many new signs anymore, but we just don't need them as much, which is awesome. As she learns to say a new word, she drops the sign, usually.

Of course, we are still working hard at producing individual sounds and making them into words. Just because I understand that "ma ha ah how" means Mickey Mouse Club House doesn't mean that the rest of the world does. (And actually the literal translation of that would be Mickey Hot Dog House, because that's what she calls the show.) So we still have weekly ST appointments where she and Jennifer play lots of fun games, which she enjoys.

This past two weeks we have seen lots of new words and phrases, such as - beach, pizza, I wanna see, me too, baby pool, and my turn (can you tell that she did not want to be left out of what the big kids were doing on vacation?). And today she said 'ocean' for Jennifer. Now, she isn't saying every sound for all of these words, but we heard the "ch" sound for the first time, and lots of "s" sounds, which are really tough for a two year old even if there isn't a cleft involved.

So, you will have to forgive me for bragging, but this kid works so hard, even her brothers notice. Today I heard Ben today saying, "Say 'socks', Kate. Lemme hear the 'ks' sound." I had to laugh. He was being so sweet:)