Sorry I don't post in here often. I always forget about JM.
We've been doing a lot of testing and evaluating on Marcus. It's been determined that he's very smart for his age and that he's got a severe speech delay (yah think!?)
Anyways, we're going to speech therapy at 2 different places 4 times a week to help out. We've only just started so I can't say if it's helping or not. He loves it though!
We did have an evaluation yesterday through a military referral. They sent us to a specific place because of his tongue tie. I've thought that there's a possibility his tongue tie could be hindering his speech, but from what I had read online, it seemed unlikely. We've known about his tongue tie since birth, but it didn't seem to hinder him eating at all so it was classified as a "slight" tongue tie and they didn't snip it.
Talking with this lady that was evaluating him, I really wish that I had looked more into it when he was a newborn. She did a little test on him to see how well he was able to move his tongue and he can barely move it at all (made me cry actually). She held a sucker at certain points in his mouth and held his chin to keep him from using his jaw rather than his tongue to get the sucker. He couldn't get the sucker at all. His tongue is completely tied down. When I was asking her why they would say it wasn't severe at birth, she explained that sometimes if the mom moves her boob in the right position, it makes nursing easy for a tongue tied baby. I remember right after he got out of the NICU, we had a lactation consultant trying to help us since he'd had barely any contact with my boob for the first 2 days of his life. She was trying to get me to hold him up and right in front of my boob that was excruciating to me and frustrating to him so I always held him lower and leaned over a bit, so that was me helping to compensate for his tongue tie. In that position he nursed fine.
Anyways, so it's been determined that the sounds he can't say are most likely caused by the tongue tie. I didn't believe it played much of a part in his delay until I saw how unable to move his tongue he was. We're going to start looking for somebody who will snip it. She cautioned me that it's going to be frustrating and hard to find someone as the EMT's around here don't like to snip it. I'm hoping that since his is bad enough that it's caused such a delay that we'll be able to find someone relatively easy.
I feel pretty guilty about all of it. I wish I had done more research into it when he was a baby and had them snip it then as it would have been painless to him and wouldn't have bled at all.
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