One step forward, two steps back
TT’s speech therapist spent several weeks slowly working up to saying the L sound. For a few minutes at the beginning of a session they would look in the mirror and make their tongue act like the elevator that TT rode on to get to therapy. Finally, they added the sound. Magically, TT made the L sound almost right away. They had been doing the motion without the sound, so adding the sound at that point was easy.
And over the course of the past month since the sound was introduced, she’s become an expert at using the L sound when we are practicing words. She doesn’t use it in her normal speech, she falls back on habit in normal speech and uses the W sound in place of the L. But we weren’t supposed to worry about that yet, we were just supposed to concentrate on our practice times and let it go the rest of the time.
Last week we were finally given the go ahead to start correcting normal speech when we heard the W in place of the L. If she said “I wove you” we were to say, “wove? Is that right?” And that worked, she would shake her head no and say it again, correctly that time (usually). Eventually she started self correcting. And then the self correcting went into overdrive and now she is using the L sound in place of all W sounds. Sure, she can say lick and love correctly now. But instead of will it is lill, and instead of watch it is lotch, and instead of wet it is let. So speech therapy this morning was mostly working on the W sound and W words. Those were just fine before, but now they are a mess.
The other step backwards is that verbs and articles have gone away again. This morning TT was trying to tell me her doggie (stuffed animal) was in the floor.
Do-ee in fuh-loor (which is doggy in floor – she can do the blends, but she has to emphasize them).
I responded with “Your doggie is in the floor? Can you say that? Say, ‘My doggie is in the floor’?”
“Doggie in four” (got doggie right, but missed the L in floor.. and she left out the verb and both articles)
We went at it for several minutes and she absolutely could not say the sentence. Two weeks ago she could have repeated it with me prompting. The words wouldn’t have been pronounced correctly, but she could have repeated the sentence back to me and included all words. Today it was not physically possible for her to say the sentence. I didn’t want her to get frustrated so in the end I got her to say it in groups of two “My doggie” and then “is in” and then “the floor” and told her that was good trying.
The speech therapist assures me this is normal, that other things backtrack as a new skill is learned and then we have to relearn the other skills we spent so much time learning already.
And little TT worked so hard in therapy today. She really tries. She wants to talk right. For such a little thing she is so determined. And her speech therapist is great at moving TT away from something before she has a chance to get frustrated. I’ve taken my cues from watching how she does it and I’m pretty good at it, too.
Now if I could just figure out how to keep myself from being frustrated…