Speech Regression

In the back of my mind for the past couple weeks, I have been noticing that Finn has stopped saying new words. Yesterday, after reading an article about Regressive Autism (something I didn't even know existed) it struck me full in the face that not only was Finn not saying any new words, but he wasn't saying any of his old words either. Suddenly, alarm sirens were going off in my head and I was on high alert, scrutinizing Finn's every sound and action. I haven't felt this anxious about my son's well-being since he was a newborn.
After about a day and a half I calmed down enough to realize that Finn was not showing any signs of autism or regression in any other areas of his development. It seems to be limited to his verbal abilities. Ben and I agreed that the responsible thing to do was call the doctor, even if that meant someone telling us we were crazy, over-concerned parents. She told us to call the local early intervention program, which I did and got bumped around to several different departments until I was finally able to leave a voice mail for someone to call me back.  It was the longest voice mail greeting I had ever sat through. They wanted me to leave so much information, I had to take notes! They never called back, so I'm thinking that after I got done giving all our names, spellings, dates of birth, address, favorite colors and shoe sizes, I forgot to leave my phone number. This wouldn't surprise me at all. I think I'm now at that level of sleep-deprivation that causes permanent brain damage.  So after waiting a couple weeks (during which time I tried to talk myself out of it, but my sense of responsibility nagged at me) I called again and remembered to leave my phone number and got a call back that very day. I was able to set up an appointment to have a couple therapists to come for a home visit to evaluate Finn. It was probably best for Finn to be in his home environment to get the best evaluation, but it meant an awful lot of work for me in the cleaning department. Its generally all I can do to keep up with the superficial housework that needs to be done for us not to drown in a sea of dirty dishes, laundry and crumbs. I doubted I'd get the opportunity to explain to the evaluators that I'm just trying to strengthen my child's immune system one mold spore and dust bunny at a time, so I neglected Finn for a couple days and deep cleaned until I was dead on my feet!

The evaluation went well in that Finn was very charming and engaging and scored at or above his age level on nearly all the assessments. But with speech he demonstrated a 50% delay in verbal ability. To put it in perspective the therapist told me that in reasoning, problem-solving,

and language comprehension he is functioning at a 2 1/2 year old level. But in his verbal ability he is at a ten-month old level. The evaluators reassured me that he shows no signs of autism and even did an extended autism evaluation just to be thorough. 

 

So as relieved as Ben and I are that Finn is developing normally in nearly all areas, we're still feeling the heavy weight of this speech delay. I don't think either of us expected it to be that bad. Unfortunately, its left us with more questions than answers, the worst of which for me is, "Why?" I am the one staying home and raising this child, if this delay is caused by something lacking in his home environment, then I am at fault. I feel like I need to know if there was something more I should have been doing or if this is just the way Finn is and even if we had worked with flash cards and I had overcome my introverted nature and talked incessantly to him all day and banned all screen time and let him cry-it-out so that he got 12 hours of uninterrupted sleep every night, he would still have been delayed in his verbal skills. I just don't know, and it bothers me.

According to the early intervention paperwork I received, children under 24 months that show a 33% delay in one area of development will qualify for services. Now we have to wait to hear from our case manager to find out what the next step is. I am assuming (and hoping) that it will be a more in-depth evaluation that will determine why he isn't talking. And once we know what's going on, they can refer us to the appropriate therapist. I haven't done much online research on speech issues yet, since I don't know what I'm looking for, but what little I have seen suggests that speech issues are among the easiest to correct when caught early. It is reassuring to know that we took the appropriate steps early on, and hopefully in a few years we'll wonder how we ever worried that he didn't talk enough!

Howling with the Wild Things

As I've mentioned before, Finn's favorite book is "Hugless Douglas," but a close second is "Where the Wild Things Are." In the middle of the book, during the "wild rumpus" there are three pages of just pictures. Now for some reason, Ben and I couldn't just leave them as pictures to look at but felt we had to add some sounds to go along with them. So when the wild things are howling at the moon, Ben and I howl, when they are swinging through the trees, we say "whee, wheee," and when they are marching in a line we sing the conga line tune. Last night when Ben and I started howling, Finn joined in and howled along. This was hilarious and awesome but then we tried to turn the page and move on but Finn would have none of it, and turned the page back to the howling page. We howled some more and tried to continue the story, but no, back we went. We howled and howled and howled until I was certain the dogs across the street would join in and the neighbors would call the cops. Ben practically had to wrestle Finn just to turn the page and continue the story. I fear this was so much fun for Finn that howling at the moon will become part of our bedtime routine....

A Barbershop Trio

Lately Finn has taken to waking up at 5 am. Since I still get very little sleep, Ben has graciously started taking over the morning shift and watching Finn while I go back to bed and try to catch an hours nap. This morning they crawled in bed with me at about 7 and I was trying to wake up. For some unknown reason, Ben decided to sing "Ahh" and for some other unknown reason I sang "Ahh" a third higher and then right on cue Finn opened his mouth and sang "Ahh" a perfect third higher than me! It was a perfect major triad and a beautiful way to wake up in the morning! We all had a wonderful laugh over it and then tried again, but Finn gave us some very strange notes that resulted in weird minor chords so I don't think I can claim that my child has perfect pitch yet. 

First jump

Finn has been trying to jump for a long time now, but he has never quite gotten his feet off the ground. Yesterday, while we were at the park we were jumping and his feet finally left the earth at the same time. He landed and then promptly fell over. He hasn't been too keen about jumping since. 

He has also started making "vroom, vroom" noises while he plays with his trucks. He must have picked  that up from daddy!

What's in a name

Ben has started asking Finn, "what's its name?" in regards to people, objects and characters in books. Finns answer is always the same, "Dadda."

Night-weaning

The time has finally come. After Christmas and all the illness and upheaval, I had let Finn get into the habit of nursing all night long.  My hope had been that as life got back to normal, the night wakings and nursing would return to normal as well. I was sadly mistaken. If anything, in January and February he started waking more and wanting to nurse more and more during the night until we were nursing nearly every hour. This is nothing new for us, of course, but in the past when I have looked into night-weaning all the books and articles I have found said the same thing: night-weaning and co-sleeping were incompatible. It seemed that if I wanted to eliminate one, I would have to eliminate both. I desperately wanted to be done nursing all night long, but I was not ready to give up co-sleeping, so I trudged on.

But then as I was hopelessly researching the subject of night-weaning once again, I stumbled across this article by Dr. Jay Gordon: http://drjaygordon.com/attachment/sleeppattern.html  It was the first article I had read that gave me the immediate sense that this was a plan that I could follow and that might actually work for us. I had Ben read it too and his comment was "Wow. He knows Finnleif well." Exactly! This spoke to our situation perfectly.

I didn't follow his plan exactly. We actually started on step 2. I know Finn well enough to know that taking him off the breast before he falls asleep would make him just as angry and frustrated as just saying "no" in the first place, so why torture him (and me) unnecessarily? We started out by talking to him during our bedtime routine about the change that was about to take place. I told him that the nursies were tired and so he could nurse right before bed but then the nursies were going to go to sleep and they wouldn't wake up until morning, just like he was going to go to sleep and not wake up until morning. I felt like I might as well throw that last pitch in there and see if I couldn't get him to sleep through the night as well just by suggesting it.

The first week was rough. He did some screaming and clawing at my shirt, but I stuck to the plan and told him the nursies were sleeping. Once he realized I wasn't going to give in, he climbed on top of me and laid his head down on my chest and fell asleep. That wasn't quite what I had in mind, but at least he wasn't nursing! Oh, how my back ached that week with 23 pounds of toddler lying on top of me for hours on end, but as things progressed, he even started falling asleep just lying next to me.

After that first week he started consolidating his sleep more and would sleep un-aided for 3-4 hours at a time. One night, even though I was technically sleeping in his bed with him, he didn't wake me up or need to cuddle at all the entire night, but put himself back to sleep whenever he woke briefly.

Now we are about a month into our night-weaning routine and I would say it has been thoroughly successful. Now I only nurse before bed and in the morning (even if he wakes before 11 pm). Finn seems to understand and he no longer demands to nurse by screaming and yanking on my shirt and I no longer have to tell him that the nursies are sleeping.

The biggest breakthrough came last night when he slept the entire night by himself in his bed without needing any assistance from me!  I woke up at 2:30, shocked that he had not awoken yet and then spent the rest of the night in my own bed waking up every 20 minutes to check the baby monitor. If Finn keeps this up, I will be the one needing sleep training next!

This has been a long 20 month journey and I know that it is nowhere near over. I fully expect that most night will not look like last night, but I am hopeful for the first time in a long time that his night wakings will become fewer and fewer until one day they are no longer a problem for either of us.

Hugless Douglas

Finn has always liked books from a very early age. But the first book that he really started to interact with (point at the pictures, laugh at parts of the story, etc) was a book called Hugless Douglas which was given to him by my friend and former employer in Bozeman, Bill Bradley and his family.
I thought this deeper interest in books would extend to all books, and it has in many ways, but not to the same level as with Hugless Douglas. It has become his absolute favorite. He requests (maybe "demands" is a better word) that we read it every night at the exclusion of all other stories. When Ben and I have tried to sneak a different book in, Finn will get up out of bed, find Hugless Douglas and plop it down on top of whatever story we are trying to read.
His devotion to this book has recently reached new heights. Lately, when he wakes up from a nap, he will come out into the living room clutching this book. When he wakes up at 5:30 in the morning he somehow finds it in the total darkness of his room, brings it into bed and sets it, not very gently, on my face.  This morning when he woke up, he couldn't find Hugless Douglas (because he had left it in Mommy and Daddy's room last night) and so he rummaged through his book pile until he found the book jacket for Hugless Douglas and brought that to me to read. Fortunately(?), since I now read this book to him 3-4 times a day I have the gist of it memorized so that I can recite some version of it to him, even at 5:30 in the morning, when I am nowhere near being awake and the book is being pressed into my face.

UPDATE: Ben has started asking Finn at the end of the book "Who does Douglas hug?" (the answer is his Mommy). At first Finn wouldn't say anything, but the past couple of times Finn has turned to Ben and whispered "Dadda." Yet another example of how this kid is Daddy's boy all the way!