Our son will be going through speech therapy at the infant program near our house. Since he was born with cleft lip and cleft palette, going through speech therapy will help him speak clearly. This program is paid by taxpayers money. It is good to know that the taxes we pay is going into these programs that help young kids like my son.
Before our son can begin his speech therapy, the parents has to go through speech therapy as well. The speech therapist (Cathy) and educational therapist (Mary) don’t believe in just a classroom type setting where the child comes in for speech therapy then goes home then goes back to speech therapy another time. That is not how they want the program to work. They want the parents to learn some speech therapy techniques as well so that when the family leaves the speech therapy office, they can continue to teach their child back home.
Today, we had our first session of ‘It takes two to talk’ class which will be a 6 weeks course. While the parents were in class, the children were at the day care next door. In our first session with Cathy, she gave a brief introduction about herself as a speech therapist and talked about what we will learn in class. So today, it was mainly about presentation.
Before Cathy made her presentation, we went around the room to introduce ourselves and talked a little bit about our child like what are some funny things s/he does. After the parents told stories about their child, Cathy seems to have definition about each child’s actions such as behavioral learning, expressive body language or something like that.
In our upcoming sessions, it will be more activities such as role play where one parent is the teacher and other parent is the child. It will be interesting to see how the role play will go. I probably always take the ‘teacher’ role so I can boss my husband around and tell him to behave. 🙂 Once we have learned some techniques, Cathy will work with the family individually and do some speech therapy sessions with our son. After we have completed the 6 weeks sessions, Cathy will set up a time with our son (about few times a month) to continue with his speech therapy. So far, according to Mary (educational therapist), our son will be in this program for at least a year.
Our class consists of 4 families. So far, the only guy present was my husband and the rest were women. The other woman said her husband will join her next time because he couldn’t take off from work. Another woman who is probably in her early or mid-twenties went to the class by herself and made a silly comment. She said ‘I didn’t know this session was also a ‘HUSBAND’ thing.’ Is this woman that traditional or just naive? Does she honestly think that the parenting is done by only women and this class was created only for women? What did she really mean when she said ‘I didn’t know this session was also a ‘HUSBAND’ thing’. If both the husband and wife are raising the child, I believe that BOTH parents should go to this class. BOTH parents should help teach their child how to communicate through speech and use of body language. So yes, this class is also a ‘HUSBAND’ thing, girlfriend. It is created for both parents. I don’t know what she was thinking.
After our first session, we went to the day care to pick up Nathan. We have no problems dropping him off at the day care. Nathan adjusts into an unfamiliar environment easily and quickly. We just had a little problem taking him away from the day care because he was having so much fun playing with the toys. I was afraid he will burst out crying when we tell him we have to leave. But we took our time with him. We explained to him that it is OK to leave for now since he will be back another time. Then we helped him put the toys away. Just happy he didn’t burst out crying while we were leaving the day care.