Hello to all --
My first post to these forums, and I hope to find perspectives and perhaps some encouragement from all of you who've walked this path before me.
My son is 27 months old, and has shown signs of being advanced practically since birth (motor development, ability to focus for extended periods, rapid learning of new skills, large receptive vocabulary and beginning to read letters). No testing to officially declare gifteness yet. I was a highly gifted kid, so the same is possible for him.
Here's the reason for my post: he's not talking. No other delays, he's just a man of few words. We've been in speech therapy for about six weeks and are making progress quickly -- he's now attempting all kinds of sounds, he vocalizes constantly, and has a small number of words that anyone could understand (and a few more that only the 'insiders' can understand). This is great, and this rapid learning curve is consistent with everything I've seen from my son since birth.
Yesterday, our SLP mentioned in passing she thinks he has apraxia of speech. I promptly did some searching online, which yielded great information, but of course without any context to my son's situation. Things that scared me included that he'd need years of therapy and still may not speak well, and that this could impact his education.
We're having a second speech eval done tomorrow (long story, but it has to do with limited insurance coverage), and I will be interested in this second party's opinions. She may have already seen apraxia in our current SLP's notes, but I have not yet mentioned it to her -- in a perfect world, these evals would be done truly independently to avoid coloring judgment unnecessarily.
For those of you who have kiddos with apraxia, I'd appreciate feedback regarding the duration and success of speech therapy, and how they've done in school since then. Did you struggle with your school not seeing beyond the label of apraxia -- that your child also happened to have quite a brain in that little head?
Thank you in advance,
Maria
