Speech

Somewhere along the line, Tom and I realized how much Natalie understands of what we say...and it is a lot!

It's hard to know, with a special needs kid, how much she understands, since all progress comes more slowly than average. It's been several months--thankfully--since it even crossed my mind to compare where she is with where Lukas was at this age. We knew how much Lukas understood because he was speaking in complete sentences by this time.

But with Natalie, we've grown accustomed to keeping "realistic" expectations...probably too low...of how much she will achieve, and how quickly she will achieve it. So lately we've been pleasantly surprised at her cognition.

I would say that she understands everything we say. We've started spelling words to keep Natalie from understanding us, not just with Lukas!

The next step is for her to start speaking, and she's really improved in the past month with her babbling. If she were a typical child, I would say that she is trying to say words...the inflection and number of syllables are often similar to what I would expect as verbal response to whatever is going on. Tom and I are hopeful that she will speak, but we try to not get our hopes up too much.

What she says now is a lot of "ba" sounds with varying inflection and varying number of syllables. She also says "ma" and seems to play around with "va" sometimes. Just this afternoon she was babbling away in a long string of baby talk and it occurred to me that she just might start talking all at once. Well, that's what might happen with a typical child who is delayed in speech for so long. Maybe that will happen with Natalie too, although it is more likely that it will happen slowly (based on what I've heard about other kids with RTS who speak).

Thanks for your continued prayers!