a,b,c's...

a couple of months ago we started speech therapy with cam...i felt like he was doing alright with making a few sounds, he did mama, dada, baba, goy, nana...so what i really wanted from therapy was to get him eating more (he was having problems moving to more solids...he ate stage three baby foods all day long, bread, puffs of all sorts, and cookies and french fries, but had a problem with choking and then vomiting on pretty much all other foods, including his bottle, and he wasn't taking a sippy or a straw). along with his speech therapy weekly, his early intervention coordinator through the school district set up a feeding eval and encouraged us to encourage cam's speech by repeating every sound he made to us, back to him (and i mean every sound).

so we faithfully went, every week, even though cam had mad stranger anxiety with the therapist and spent half of every session clinging for his life to my neck. and billy and i have been making an extra effort to repeat every single sound that comes out of our boy's mouth. we got some great advice on eating from the therapy sessions, along with our early intervention coordinator, each week. i also started singing a,b,c's to camden at bed time, i sing once through the traditional way...a,b,c...and then through with just the sounds (ah, ba, ca, da...). i do it at bedtime because that is when i have his fullest attention, he will do anything to postpone going to bed.

so here we are one and a half months later and cam is now eating and swallowing (without choking) small bites of meat (chicken, meatballs, vienna sausages), small fruit slices, yogurt, fruit bars, cereal bars, bagels and cream cheese, peanut butter, steamed veggies, most anything sweet, graham crackers, pudding...you get the idea) and he hasn't thrown up anything in about three plus weeks! we still have a long way to go, because the bites are still ultra tiny but we are getting somewhere! he is also drinking through a straw!

as far as speech goes, he has started to blossom, he is trying to mimic a lot of sounds we make, where before he would only mimic mama and the other sounds he only said when babbling...now he copies ma, da, ba, wa, ga, ka (this one is a little throaty), s (it's a mix between an s and th, because he has no top teeth, but it sounds pretty dang good for a toothless s), h, na, doe, no (which he is also saying in correct context here and there), ta, oh, uh. we are really working on getting him to say uh oh and hi and the e and i sound...but he hasn't quite yet. all in all i am so excited to see improvement!
~
seeing cam blossom and knowing that he can and will continue to accomplish so much is so amazing to watch! we are so proud of his hard work! and so thankful that we live in a day where the help that he needs is available.