The Gift of Gab

In case you couldn't tell by reading my previous posts, I like to chat.

 

I'm a talker. I love conversation, I love to tell stories, and I talk...a lot. Sometimes very loudly, due to having grown up in a household with a father with a slight hearing loss. The louder he turned up the television, the louder my mom and I had to talk...and so on. I often find that I can't control the volume of my voice and have to have someone tell me "You're talking very loudly right now..." in order to tone it down.

Boy is also a talker. A loud talker, since he spends most of his time with my parents and is having the same "talk loud enough for Granddad to hear you" kind of training I had.
Bubba was a very late talker, but once he started he never stopped. He even talks in his sleep, I swear. He can also switch topics at the speed of light and you find yourself utterly confused. His teacher told me at a recent conference that his vocabulary and intelligence are so above average that he can sit and converse with Bubba about math, science, etc as if he were talking to another adult.

Boo also has an extensive vocabulary, and talks well beyond the average level of a 6 year old. Sometimes he goes off on tangents that make ZERO sense...but he's a good talker.

That brings us to Princess Bean. Who...doesn't have the gift of gab at all.

She has about 20 words she uses on a regular basis, and she's two and a half years old. It got a little worrisome...so off to speech therapy we went!

Tuesday was our evaluation. As expected, she was developmentally on par for everything...except her speech.

Her speech is at the level of a 15-18 month old. Now, while I'm partly grateful for the brief reprieve of my children talking my ear off when the boys are at school and Princess Bean is the only one at home, it gets a little frustrating when she just can't (or won't) converse with me and tell me what she wants. She's good at communicating without words, but on those occasions when she can't figure out how to let me know it's really hard to cope sometimes.

The thing about speech delay is that it's not like a delay in walking where we can do exercises or get tools that can help her along. It's just something we have to wait for, and hope that monthly therapy helps to hurry it along.