The Power of Communication

As I've mentioned before, Levi does occupational therapy every Thursday at Fisher Titus Hospital. He used to do physical therapy as well but has since mastered his physical milestones and is continuing to develop at a 'normal' rate. I was hoping that Speech would be the one therapy that Levi didn't need. However, he won't be skimping out on any therapy sessions. He needs some speech help. He says a few words~ Mama, Dada, Hi, Go and ever so occasionally Bye. Levi is 19 months old now and should be say more than this. He doesn't even say Uh-Oh. I talked to his occupational therapist about it and she agrees that Levi should start in speech therapy. However, there's a HUGE waiting list to get in Speech at FTMC. I think he is like number 27 on the list, right now.

I tried going through the Early Intervention program (which is the program we started on when Levi was 4 weeks old before being referred to FTMC for therapy at 10 months) but all they offer right now is group sessions. After going to one hour long speech group session, that felt an awful lot like an extended OT session, I couldn't bring myself to go to another one. I've been to alot of therapy sessions but that one was by far the most difficult to deal with. Some sessions are extremely difficult and tiring when Levi is in one of his moods. If he doesn't want to do it then he just won't do it. 'Just won't do it' doesn't happen at therapy. If he won't do something then the therapist and I physically hold him in the situation and make his arms and hands do the action we wanted. As you can imagine, Levi gets extremely upset about this and screams and hollers. But we tell him how wonderful he has done and I give him a hug and he settles right down and gets back to playing. On a real bad day we can have about 6 or 7 'fits' during a 30 minute OT session. However, we haven't had a real bad day in quite a while. Levi is even doing 45 minute sessions now instead of just 30. He hasn't even had a 'fit' for at least a good month now. Progress is finally starting show!!

So, we're still waiting for the speech to come through. But in the meantime, his occupational therapist gives me some good ideas to work on at home. One of the things she has suggested is teaching Levi some sign language. The thing that I am most worried about is that his lack of communication abilities will result in frustration and fits. He's already gotten upset with me a few times because I just didn't know what he wanted. So, we're trying a few words of the sign language and he is doing really well with it. He can say please, thank you, eat and more. When I walked into his room he was standing in his crib and looked right at me and said 'Mama' and then he said 'eat' with his sign language. It's really amazing to see him use the sign language without being prompted to. I know that he will talk eventually but the sign language will give him the ability to communicate with us while we wait.


Here's a little video of Levi running around this morning in his diaper. The middle of the video gets a little dark when Levi runs to the living room but it just lasts a couple of seconds. He can't stay still for long.