Whats in a Name?

Though we are NOT pregnant this cartoon SOOO made me laugh. A name. A label. Something. Whatever you want to call it. Sometimes the name is what people see. Given the last comments I won't be to negative. I do wish sometimes that I could yell at the top of my lungs or send a million letters or put up a bill board to help people understand what it is that us as a mom, or our kiddos with Special needs need or want or how it works or what it feels like. I don't want people to think that I think Tyler is any more Special than anyone Else's kids. I don't think he is. But a name is a name. (OK Really he IS more special.. he is AMAZING!! And he is especially cause he is mine!)

But really do we really need a Name? I am not talking about the name we call him. But the name or label or diagnosis we get.

Today we went for what we thought was a speech evaluation for Apraxia or some other language disorder. Why you ask? Well despite the " my kid is not any different than any other kid" Ty doesn't talk. Its not that he will do it in his own time. ( I Have heard it a thousand times) And he is not JUST a boy ( heard that one two thousand times). But frankly there is something wrong. It isn't that you go in search for what could be wrong but sometimes it is like a big neon sign SCREAMING at you. At some point you HAVE to read it. You have to look at it.

As a infant he didn't really babble. He would make a few sounds. He cried. He laughed. He smiled. But the cooing wasn't really there. Because we were focused on a thousand other things we didn't really think that much about. We didn't have a speech therapist in Utah at all. We had everything else.

When we moved to Arizona we didn't get one right off either. He had been saying dad and we really thought he would just start talking. He kinda did that with everything else. After a bit of time we got a speech therapist. We got ANOTHER speech therapist. The first one moved. The second one never really got Ty going.

When he turned 3 we moved to yet another agency. That was also when we started school. So he gets private and he gets stuff as school. Then at school he failed his hearing test. We have passed all of them up to this point.

When we did his sedated ABR there was no reason why we isn't talking. His hearing is perfect. So of course I went in search of something and kept coming back with Apraxia of speech. He has pretty good receptive skills meaning he will follow directions. But the expressive is pretty crappy.

We finally got him to say "Ba" But that is about all we get out of him. He does say no. But otherwise everything is the same syllable. When we went to Utah and others heard his non speaking it was more apparent there was something wrong.

So back to the grind. Our hearing doc set up an appointment to get and evaluation done at a place in Mesa. The "thought" was it would give us some answers more than just" You know he has a brain bleed right?" But I was wrong. It ended up not being what I thought ti would be. It ended up being exactly what we do each week at speech therapy.

There was no magic label or name we could put on him that doesn't end up in the same result of something that we are all ready doing. All ends up back to speech therapy.

Though we all ready knew he wasn't " up to par" ( her words not mine) with "average" three year ODs there is no magic answer.

So there ya have it. The name we have for it is ........ We don't know. We have a bleed. We have delays. We have Cerebral palsy. It kinda doesn't give me or anyone else a starting point. But the end result is Speech therapy.

When we went home, the end result was the same. We love Tyler and we are so proud of the amazing things he has accomplished. We have ideas of ways we can help him improve but otherwise..... Speech Therapy!