Nathan had his first appointment with a speech therapist at UCSF. She gave him a children’s book with various pictures and tried to make him say or babble anything just to see how the sound he makes comes out of his mouth. She asked us if he knows any words so far. I told her nothing yet. So far, he would pronounce everything with ‘m’ or ‘n’. If he says ‘banana’, he will say ‘ma ma’ or ‘na na’. If he says ‘cat’, he will say ‘ma ma’ or ‘na na’. Nelson and I tried to have him say ‘hi’, ‘bye’ and other words. But he couldn’t pronounce the letter ‘h’ or ‘b’ yet. Most of the time when we try to teach him how to say certain words, he would look at us funny and just laughs. He thinks we are playing with him. 🙂 However, I do recall hearing him say ‘Hi’ twice. The speech therapist would like us to meet with her in 3 months to see how he progresses.
She did tell us that there are other speech therapist in our area. Since he is still young and only had cleft palate surgery two months ago, she feels that we should give him more time to adjust and learn new things on his own (of course with our help) instead of putting him into a regular speech program. Once we feel he is old enough to enter a regular speech program, there are two ways we can do this. One way is to send him to some regional office that is free. But she feels that he may not qualify for this free program. She said why but for some reason I can’t remember. Then of course there is a speech program that is insurance approved (which means something we will have to pay for ourselves).
After speaking with the speech therapist, we met with other doctors who looked at Nathan’s palate just to see how well it is healing. So my husband sat on the patient chair holding Nathan and there were about 5… yes FIVE… doctors looking at Nathan’s palate. One doctor said that he palate is looking great but it seems short from back to front. I told the doctor that some food still goes up my son’s nose especially those pureed food kinds. I felt that the doctor didn’t believe me. I told him that I took pictures of it and asked him if he wanted to see it. But he never said responded to my question. So the doctor started to talk about something else that was not important for me to hear. After listening to other things I wasn’t interested in hearing from him, I told him AGAIN that my son still sneezes food out from his right nostril. I asked whether if this will be damaging to his nose or will his front palate close at all! I told the doctor that the front palate close to this top teeth appears to be open still and that is how the food gets into his nose. I specifically told him where I believe the food is going because earlier the doctor told me that his palate is closed.
After seeing the doctors, some guy with a camera told us he wants to take Nathan’s pictures. So the guy with camera tried to take Nathan’s pictures but couldn’t because he had the camera cover on! DUH! After he removed the cover, he took pictures of Nathan’s front face and left, right side. Afterwards, he took a family picture of three of us. Until today, I still have no idea why this guy took pictures of us. Then he handed Nathan a kids toothbrush. Earlier, I noticed that he took pictures of other families too who had appointments that day.
Nathan may not know how to say some words right now but he knows his eyes, hands, feet, ears, hair, tummy, pants, socks, etc. When he is sitting on my lap, he would get my attention and point down meaning he wants to get down. Also, he would grab my hand and point to me what he wants or where he wants to go. Just now, Nelson showed his son how to ‘spank’ his mommy! So Nathan actually spanked me. I said ‘hey! what you doing?’ :-0
