Bye Bye Speech Therapy!

I am feeling overjoyed, relieved & kind of emotional right now. My mom told me Wednesday that our ST was going to call to talk to me about possibly releasing Ryan from therapy but I really didn't think it was going to happen. I guess I just focused on the "possibly" too much. But, I talked with her last night and yes, he has been released! It's just almost unbelievable to me how fast Ryan has all the sudden started talking more and more. I am convinced it started after he was put on the antibiotic a couple months ago and it got rid of his congestion & cough (for the time being anyway). He still has a processing delay but she says that will improve with time and everyday conversations & activities we do with him. The processing delay is when we ask him questions and he won't answer so we have to ask him again and remind him to "listen". When he started 13 months ago he was 18 months old and was barely saying 5 words. If he said a new word, then he would stop saying another. Or he would say a new word one time and that was the first and last time he said it. His attention span was all of 10 seconds most times. Sometimes we could get him to sit down and play with cars for a longer period of time but for him to sit down and have us read a book for instance was non-existent. It took probably a good 4-6 months for us to see improvement in his speech. He was saying more single words and his attention span went up dramatically. He was able to sit and flip through a book or do simple puzzles. His love of puzzles became more and more apparent as the weekly sessions went on and at 2 years old he was completing 12 piece puzzles most 3 or 4 year olds do. Now at almost 3, he can do most 24 piece puzzles. We thought once he started preschool last September that his speech would jump as well since he was around other kids but it didn’t. He was still saying single words and a couple two word sentences. With preschool came the colds. Almost every other week he was congested, had a cough & runny nose. We knew this would happen, but didn’t expect it so often. Finally in mid-February he was put on an antibiotic because he was so congested that he started vomiting several times one particular morning and had fluid in his ears. Once his congestion cleared up, it’s like a new Ryan emerged. He became more vocal and was stringing together 2, 3 & some 4 word sentences. Ryan’s speech therapist was amazed by his progress in such a short period of time and so were we. Three weeks ago we decided it was time to let “paci” go bye bye. We had been working on letting him having it less throughout the day and limited it to naps and bedtime only (okay, in the car as well). One evening, Ryan bit the end off of the paci so we decided that it was the perfect moment to let paci go. We said bye bye to paci because it was “broken” and it’s been nothing but a positive outcome from it. Since then, Ryan has improved even more. He’s almost constantly chattering, asking questions such as “what’s dat noise?”, “where’s daddy?” and new phrases emerge from him every day. Almost 6 weeks ago, Ryan had a speech evaluation for the school system which he would transition into after his 3rd birthday. At the time he passed the “tests” but the report was written in such a way that he would qualify since he did have a processing delay. He will need to get retested in August to see if he would still qualify for the language area of therapy but all signs point to him not needing services, therefore; not qualifying. We are just beyond estatic but as a mother, I still worry. I worry that it won’t get better or that he will backslide. Our ST has assured me that I can call her at any time, with any questions or concerns. This definitely makes me feel a little better and hopefully I won’t ever need to. I’m definitely thanking GOD for seeing us through yet another part of Ryan’s life.