Wednesday, March 25, 2009

A conversation with Emmi

The past two weeks, there has been remarkable improvement in Emmi's speech. She has progressed by leaps and bounds. Her speech therapist has been focusing on two things the past months. The first was final "k" in her words. Over the past week, she has been getting final "k" about 50% of the time! This has been extremely hard for her. The other focus point was past tense with "ed." She gets the concept of "I went to the park," and "They were there," but she physically could not say words like "played" and "baked" (double whammy... final k and ed!). A few days ago, she spontaneously said, "I dropped it." Clear as can be! I knew if she got it once, that eventually it would get stronger as she figured out how to manipulate her mouth and make the sound. So I know we are on the right path. So many people are beginning to understand her. She still gets ahead of herself a lot. We have to remind her to slow her speech down, to enunciate. And while you can't make out every single word she is saying, she definitely gets her point across.

Two days ago, Emmi and I had a conversation about her school friends, Owen hitting her in the face ("That Owen!" is a phrase said a lot around here. Although, for the record, I think Owen is a pretty funny kid), her need for a reindeer, and just how much she loves Valentine's.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

She's so cute!! I was able to follow quite a bit of that but having the context definitely helped. I mean, she went from reindeer to valentines, that's some serious topic hopping! I loved seeing her throw in those signs too. It's incredible how the ability to articulate even one letter (like K in her case, or b in Ethan's case) makes such a huge difference in their ability to be understood. So glad to hear she's making progress right now, it feels GOOD doesn't it? We deserve it, all of us.

Kristina said...

Wow! Emmi really does well on the camera - not a bit shy! I love hearing her talk. She sounds really good and can carry on a great conversation. It was nice to see her talking and signing. Emma is starting to make more vocalizations with her CI (activated 3 months ago) and "playing" with her voice a bit. I have big hopes for her.

Tricia said...

Kristina,

We need to catch up! How is Emma doing?! Not only with the CI, but with everything else?