The Call Finally Came

Today during lunch I got THE CALL I've been waiting for:  Miss Becky, Natalie's SLP at school, called.  My first question was, "were you surprised?"

She only said "Oh, my gosh!" about fifteen times during the conversation.  No exaggeration.

Since Natalie missed so much school after her surgery, today was the first time Miss Becky saw her.  She said she started out with a simple "Bobby's ball" request for Natalie to mimic.  She was expecting something like "Bobby bah" and instead got "Bobby's ball" with the "s" and "l" on the end of each word.  Becky said Natalie was doing three- and four-syllable words...I countered and said she's speaking three- and four-word sentences.

So Becky will be making some new goals for Natalie since she's blown last year's IEP goals out of the water (Natalie's next IEP isn't until November).  Becky said she'll work on plurals and multi-phrase sentences (The boy is hitting the ball in the box) and pronouncing the letter "l" (she often uses an "n" for an "l" when it's at the beginning).  I mentioned Natalie is leaving out articles (a, the) and still has a problem with "k" sounds (Lukas, Konrad).

She also mentioned that Natalie is impulsive, wanting to move on, and asked me if I'd seen that.  I said yes, but it may also be that she's progressed so much further than Becky even expects that Natalie wants to show her everything she can say now.

It was a fun call, to say the least.

And here's a fun outing we had the other night.  Carla gave Natalie some Baskin Robbins gift certificates to help her stitches heal, and Natalie shared them with the whole family (somehow, Carla's heard that Natalie likes ice cream...I don't know how she ever got that idea!)  Natalie and Konrad had chocolate ice cream, and Lukas has discovered sherbet (and got to indulge in the waffle cone dipped in chocolate with sprinkles on top...yikes, that's a meal!)  Tom and I had ice cream too, but it's more fun to see the kids enjoying it.  Thanks Carla!