Hey everyone!

Today we have another Speech Delay story to share with you. Today’s story is from Tracy who blogs over at The Blessed Life. Please read her story and then leave her some love and words of encouragement on this post. Talking about Speech Delay and sharing our stories is so important – not only for our hearts but to help soothe the hearts of other families going through the same thing.

If you have a Speech Delay story of your own that you would like to share – please e-mail me at [email protected]

Lawson has always been behind in major milestones.  He was late to sit up, late to crawl, late to walk, even late getting teeth!  He suffered from persistent ear infections and eventually after learning he was not hearing much of anything and that the fluid was never going away on it’s own, we got tubes.  He was a year old when we got tubes.  I was for sure that getting tubes was going to help us out both in the speech department, but also in growth.  Honestly, I was more concerned about his low weight.  Speech wasn’t really on my radar at that time.  
As he got a little older, I realized that even though we had tubes, he wasn’t really picking up any speech. We have a program run by the state health department that offers speech therapy and ot and so I took him for an evaluation.  I knew he was behind, but apparently I was a little in the dark about how behind. We qualified for both and have been doing once a week speech and every other week ot for several months now.  It is constantly a battle for me to not get discouraged because we aren’t seeing a whole lot of progress.

Lawson is mostly still working on learning other ways to communicate like signing or pointing.  It is hard as his mom on several levels including dealing with the whining and crying when he can’t get his point across, but also trying to accept that his progress is still progress even if it isn’t as fast as I would like it.  He says nana now for banana and will say yaya for I love you.  Other than that, he really doesn’t use any other words/sounds consistently or in the right context.  He will turn two in January and while I would love an answer to why he is having trouble I would REALLY love it if he would just start talking.

I haven’t taken him to private therapy yet, mostly because of cost, but it is currently something we are trying to figure out.  Dealing with his speech delay is frustrating but luckily I have a great family and everyone is super positive and supportive.  I know God has great plans for Lawson and I look forward to seeing how he uses all of this for His glory!

Tracy