Shut Down

Today's speech therapy session for McKenna started out great. She was interested in the toys and games she was working hard and making lots of attempts at speech. And then about 30 minutes in to the hour long session she pretty much just suddenly completely shut down. She just sat there staring off into space and acting like she had no energy or inclination to try to speak, sign or even play. Ms. T. her SLP (Speech Language Pathologist) didn't push her, she backed off and just sat and waited. She never really did snap out of it though for the rest of the hour we could hardly get her to participate. Then after Ms. T. left she just sat in my lap with her head on my shoulder.

I'm not sure what was going on.? If she suddenly got self conscious or discouraged or if she just used up all of her energy and was completely on empty..? I felt bad for her though.

Ms. T. feels McKenna is doing well. She said McKenna is very young at only 27 months and that an hour long session is going to be a challenge for a while. That makes sense to me. We talked about not pushing her too hard. We will all need to learn to read McKenna's signals on that. We also need to make sure we often ask McKenna to say things we know she can say and then really praise her for it so she feels success.

Right now I'm supposed to really focus on vowels. Isolate the main vowel sound in the word and try to have her repeat it. She can do that maybe 60 or 70 percent of the time with 1 word. But when we try to take the vowel sound out of two words and ask her to put them together- that is REALLY hard for her. She rarely succeeds at that. For instance for "right now" I would ask her to say, "i ow". She can say "i" she can say "ow", but when she tries to say them together it either all falls apart or she doesn't even really make a sound (attempt). She just sits there and looks like there is a struggle going on.

I expressed to Ms. T. my overwhelmed feeling after last week and she was very sweet and caring. She encouraged me by saying even with dyspraxia there is often a "click". Meaning once we start getting McKenna on the right path there may/hopefully be a time when things start to click and she doesn't have to struggle every single step of the way. I really hope she's right about that. Because otherwise we have a very very long road ahead of us. I am attempting to take this one day at a time. When I do that I'm good.

Thank you for saying prayers for McKenna's brain and mouth and everything in between. (-:

Love,
Amber

P.S. Thank you Nyree for sharing about your son Paskale- continued blessings in your journey with him. Also thanks to everyone else who commented with support and prayers in my last two posts!