Drooling

My fourth child has been our biggest drooler.  From the day he was born, he’s always drooled a lot!  I used to think that some moms were exaggerating when they said they would have to change their child’s clothing a couple of times a day because they would drool so much, and then I had him!  😉  He just turned three and still drools a lot.

Late Talker

Like I mentioned, he just turned three and doesn’t talk very much.  At first I wasn’t too concerned because we’ve had some other late talkers in the family and he is the youngest of four, so the older kids tend to talk for him, or just figure out want he wants and needs and provides it for him without him having to say anything.

Concern

I started to get a little leery when he turned two and a half and was hardly talking.  I decided to give him a little more time to see if his speech would come around.  I decided that I would give it until we had moved and been moved in for about two weeks and reevaluate to see if I thought we needed to seek help.  After we moved he tried to talk.  He would come up to me and make sounds like he was talking but I couldn’t understand what he wanted at all.  I’d play a guessing game, naming off things that it could be and we would both end up very frustrated.  There were many times, he would come and get me, pull on my shirt and lead me to where he needed me to be, say a whole bunch of sounds and I’d start guessing again.  After this had gone on for a little while (he had started it before we moved) and we both ended up frustrated, I decided it was time.

I called and set up a meeting with a child development special services organization.  I guess most normal people go to their physician first, but I guess since there are speech pathologists in the family and I was a teacher, I just knew where to go.  After I filled out the paperwork, he was evaluated and he qualified for services.  He had to have a hearing test to make sure it wasn’t a hearing problem, which my husband and I would have been shocked at.  We have never had concerns about if he understands us, we just can’t understand him.

For a few months, we had a speech pathologist come to our house once a month for an hour and tried to get him to talk and taught me certain things I could do to help him talk as well.  The speech pathologist suggested that he may have speech apraxia.

Biting

Right before we moved, he started biting almost wherever we would go.  This was very hard on me for many reasons.  I felt like I was a horrible parent, I said many tearful apologies to parents.  I felt like I had done something wrong, none of my other kids were biters so this was all new territory for me.  It was also terrible because for about three and a half months, I had no “me” time.  If I would leave him at Mom’s Day Out or the daycare at the gym, I’d be getting called or paged to come get him fifteen minutes later because I needed to take him because he had bit someone.

Emotional

This was very emotional for me.  I felt like it was my fault and I know some other parents thought the same thing.  I know a lot of them were judging me and it felt awful.  I became very sensitive to comments made about my children and my parenting.  I’m sure that one of my friendly acquaintances was just trying to be informative, but I felt like she went out of her way to tell me that my child had bit.  I felt very judged by her.  Now I can sympathize with her, because she ended up having a first time biter as well.

Tips

It was suggested that we get him:

• an 
  and
• .

He knew exactly what to do with the chewy tubes and walked around with the electric toothbrush on a lot!

School

Now that he is three, he has outgrown the early childhood special services organization, so we had to have him evaluated to see if he would qualify for services through preschool.  He went to preschool for two days (3 hours per day) in order to get evaluated.  The results meeting was very hard.  Not only was he not behaving, but even though the therapists and specialist tried to be very nice, it’s hard listening to every problem they encountered with your child for an entire hour!

 His first day of school.

Update

He goes to school just under 5 hours a week.  (This was very hard on me, even though I taught 3 year olds, I have come across very few who are actually ready.  I also wasn’t ready to give my baby up!  I prayed long and hard for help on doing the right thing for him and not to make a decision based upon my selfishness.  He gets an hour of speech services a week at school.)

He has this 

He has stopped biting (for the most part, every once in a while, it rears its ugly head again).

We are making him attempt to talk when he wants something, this has gotten so much easier.  When we first started this months ago, he went without some things that he wanted because he refused to try.  I now say “Nice talking” so much I’ve noticed I say it in my dreams!

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If you are ever concerned about your child’s development, talk to your physician.