As far as speech goes, Ashlynn communicates her wants and needs.  She has basic conversational skills and really does try to tell us what happened in her day.  Sometimes when she’s talking, I see my husband look at her with pride in his eye and I know what he’s thinking.   Even though we don’t always understand what she is saying, it is amazing to listen to her talk and try to tell us things.  She was silent for so long.  

I love her speech therapist.  She was actually my mentor and is now one of my good friends.  She’s fun, but I also know she’ll push her.  However, I also know she’ll find the deficits and the continued deficits are hard to be faced with and make me sad.  I want to write it down though, because if I know anything about Ashlynn, I know she’ll overcome it.

– She has significant word finding issues.  Sometimes, she needs so much wait time that eventually she even forgets what she wanted to say and moves onto something else.  

– Her attention continues to negatively impact her progress

– When something is hard, she changes the subject and tries to talk about something else

– Auditory processing skills such as auditory discrimination between minimal pairs (sleep, seep) appear to be impacted.  

– Grammar, including marking varying tenses and using s/v agreement along with pronoun usage are faulty

– Syntax is jumbled, particularly for question forms

– Still has a tendency to assimilate sounds she knows how to say (goggy/doggy), and continues to be inconsistent with her production of consonants in her repertoire (koys/toys). 

– Needs continued work with /l/ and /r/

– Continues to breakdown with novel multi-syllabic words

– Receptive language skills continue to need monitoring

That’s a long list, but I have to remind myself it used to be longer.  She’ll get there.  I know it.  There was a time I worried if she would ever make friends because she couldn’t talk to them.  Here she is at the splash park talking to perfect strangers and making friends.  One step at a time.