Jacob's Last Speech Session

The sad day arrived...it was Jacob's last speech session with Miss Susan. The one Jacob always tried to go home with. By any means possible! Let's just say this was the saddest departure yet.

Jacob loved Miss Susan. He especially got excited to see what she had in her bags!

And she quickly learned what Jacob loved (cars and farm things) and brought those kinds of toys and books. She was such a great teacher and obviously, Jacob really connected with her!

Not happy at all to hear that it was time to pack up the toys. :( Poor boy. He cried and cried and cried. He was just inconsolable.

Even after his favorite meal of spaghetti he was still sad. But then he met Miss Amy, his new speech teacher, and he was happy. He loves her as well. She came to test him before school started. He did phenomenal considering it was 45 minutes of no toys! I knew he'd improved a LOT over the summer, but until she started the testing (which I saw Miss Susan do at the beginning), I didn't realize exactly how much! When we had his IEP meeting before school, she went over the results with us. He jumped 20+ points in his expressive language!! She said he is actually spot-on for his age, but because of the way he leaves off letters at the beginning of words it makes him really hard to understand. Which qualifies him for speech. I can probably understand about 85-90% of what he says now, but everyone else probably only understands 25-30% of what he says. So I'm excited to see how much he improves this year with preschool! He's such a mimicker. Miss Amy said the best thing we can do with him at home is to repeat correctly what he says. If he says "i hee a hemi" we repeat "You see a semi?" etc. And I've noticed that the more he talks, the funnier he gets!

Speaking of Progress

I've forgotten to update on Jacob's speech for quite a while. After the evaluation, the early ed center set up a time to come and start speech therapy. His eval showed his comprehensive language was right on target for his age, but his expressive language was at about 18 months. There was about a month's time between the eval and his first session. The speech path was very surprised at how much he had learned in that time. He really kind of exploded. It's still not even close to where an almost-3-year-old should be, but he's doing a lot better. I would say he's at least tripled his vocabulary in the last 2 months. Here's a great sample ;)

I was wiping his nose one day and said this and he repeated me. It was too funny!

Evaluation Outcome

Jacob's speech evaluation was yesterday afternoon. He did SO good!! I was a little surprised, but once he saw those ladies had bags of goodies (toys), he went right to them and tried taking stuff out! :) He was very cooperative and did such a great job. I was surprised at some of the cognitive things he was able to do. They had to "test" all areas, not just the speech. Their conclusion is that he is one smart little boy but he basically just can't pronounce the words he's trying to say yet. He understands everything you say to him and he has his own words, he just can't enunciate. Sooo, they will do speech therapy with him twice a month until he turns 3 (end of August) and then they'll turn it over to the school district for speech therapy. I've noticed the last couple of days he's started saying a few more things a little more clearly. Not sure anyone else would recognize them as words, but I notice a bit of a difference.
I'm really glad he liked the ladies so much (one that came will be the one doing the therapy). He actually tried to go home with them!! I was holding him in the yard because he tried to get in their car (not entirely unusual--the boy loves cars!) and he held his arms out to one of the ladies to take him!!
Anyway, I just wanted to update! Thanks for praying!!