18 month well baby checkup and speech update

Here’s a picture of Emily enjoying her favorite morning snack, pretzels. She needs to be absolutely certain that the pretzel does not fall out of her mouth. I’m happy to say she has yet to bite her own fingers, but then again she only has about four and a half teeth.

Emily had her 18 month well-baby visit on Thursday (11/30). She actually turned 19 months on 11/15, but it’s difficult to get a well-baby appointment scheduled in less than a month (we procrastinated with getting her on the schedule). Emily weighs 23 lbs 11 oz. and is 32 1/4 inches tall. She’s leveled off to the 50th percentile for height and weight and we’re continually happy that she’s a thriving, healthy toddler who loves to eat. We had so many concerns about eating when I was pregnant with her, and we had some feeding diffulties in between her lip and palate repairs. You’d never know it now though! Her favorite foods include strained sweet potatoes, hot dogs, noodles, soy sausages, string cheese, kix cereal, pretzels and chicken nuggets.

She’s eating sweet potatoes and allowing me to indulge in a quick shot of her in pigtails which two seconds later became sweet-potato-tails.

Emily had a visit with her speech therapist who she hasn’t seen for about six weeks. She’s making a lot more sounds and words since the last visit. I have noticed some sound substitutions that I’ve been concerned with. For example, she replaces the “N” sound with “G” so “Ana” becomes “Aga.” We are going to work with her to help her learn to make the sound. The two excerises we’ll start with are having her say the “M” sound as much as possible which has no trouble with and also blowing. Apparently blowing is no longer a preferred method of speech therapy except when the child is using the “G” sound in place of other consonants, which Emily does quite frequently. She’ll say “Gaggy” instead of “Daddy” for example. She’s getting better and better at these difficult sounds though. Robin, her therapist, was impressed with how clear some of Emily’s words were including “shoes,” “eeieeio” and “thank you.” I’m going to read up on how we can further help Emily with her speech difficulties. She really tries hard to communicate, but it clearly seems to be difficult for her to get her mouth to behave the way it should with certain sounds.