So anyone who knows us in real life or follows my wife's blog knows that we've been addressing a speech delay in our son. He started speech therapy a little over a month ago, and also met with a developmental pediatrician around that time. We were relieved beyond words when the dev-ped told us she saw no evidence of autism, and we'll meet with her again in a coupl'a months to follow up.
Well yesterday his primary speech therapist told me their "working diagnosis" was developmental apraxia of speech. It's a working diagnosis because he's really too young for them to make a full diagnosis. So it could change in time, but that's the symptoms they see currently, so that's what we're going to be treating.
Apraxia is basically a disconnect between the brain sending a signal and the signal being received. It's a motor planning issue. There are like a billion different types. Often times it manifests as difficulty following a command. For example, someone with apraxia of the limbs might be able to lift their arms up to do something, but then when you say, "Hey, could you grab that off the shelf for me?" they couldn't do it. For whatever reason, the signal leaves the brain but has trouble getting where it needs to be. So our son has trouble repeating you, and certain consonant sounds are hard for him to do, especially on command. He'll say "buh buh buh" on his own sometimes, but it's very hard to get him to repeat it. Similarly, when he wants you to pick him up, he says "uh" because the p sound is one he just can't do. (On a side note, apraxia is the same condition that affects stroke victims who lose the ability to speak or use parts of their body. That's called acquired apraxia rather than developmental apraxia. The more you know...)
So anyway, as with any developmental disorder, the severity of apraxia can vary. We are confident that our boy will overcome this (and his therapist said as much), but it is going to take therapy, lots of work here at home, and time. His receptive language has come so far since we started therapy (his verbal language has improved too, just not as much as we'd like). He signs things to us, follows commands (even when the words are new to him, like when we were outside planting some herbs the other day and I asked him to bring me the seed packets and he did), and he's showing progress every week in his therapy sessions.
So that's where we're at. I said a while back that I'd post more about the speech issues, and I never did. The story of how we got here is long and probably not that interesting, but it suffices to say we were pretty stressed, worried, and scared for a while in the early stages of this. I know apraxia is no walk in the park, but frankly I'm still so relieved that he's not showing signs of autism that it's keeping me pretty positive about this.
Also, wish us luck. We're going to start transitioning him into his own room starting today. Since we moved, he's been sharing our room with us (and invariably our bed too after he wakes up at some point in the night and makes it clear he wants out of the crib). We figured a new house was a big enough transition, but now his room is set up and ready to be lived in, and he's had some time to get used to this place, so here we go. He'll take naps in there for a few days, then we'll put him down there for the night (and I suspect I'll be getting up pretty early those first few days until he gets the hang of it).
