My early years as an SLP-in-training and as a full-fledged SLP were chock-full of adorableness.  Little people make the cutest speech and language errors, and I found myself giggling daily right after therapy sessions (it is NOT professional to giggle DURING sessions).  One 3 year old girl had finally realized that my fellow therapist wanted her to make the /k/ sound at the beginning of /k/ words so she generalized that /k/ to the beginning of everything.  In frustration, she stomped her foot and said, “Kuh, I want a TOOKIE!”  My own preschool client said, “Kuh, look at the rainbow tolors!”  One little girl called me “the peach lady” and then after a few months of therapy with me, she could form a consonant blend and now called me “the squeech lady.”  That was pretty much the pinnacle of my career.  I’ll never top it.

My early childhood language training unfortunately came from a professor who desperately needed to retire at least 10 years before I sat through her classes.  I still can’t comprehend why we had the most poorly written textbook I have ever seen (no, she didn’t write it, so we weren’t just using it to boost her sales) or how a topic as exciting as language development could be made dull, lifeless, and stab-yourself-in-the-eye so as not to die of boredom during class.  But magically, that’s what I had.  It sucked.

Imagine my delight when I had clients who literally brought my training to life and were so much cuter and more interesting than a textbook.  And then that delight multiplied exponentially when I had my own children.  Watching Zach and Rissa acquire language was one of my favorite activities as a mommy. The dry list of milestones came to life and MY kids were doing it!  Their brains were functioning just as I had learned that they should!  Their God-given desire to communicate and be understood was happening right in front of me!  I soaked up every moment, just in case we didn’t have any more children after the twins and this ended up being my simultaneous first and last experience with watching babies develop.

And then we had Nathaniel, and everything about him was a bonus layer of frosting on the cake of motherhood.  I already had these two amazing kids who could not possibly be surpassed in awesomeness… and now a third kid was keeping up with them and perpetuating his own brand of awesomeness in my life.  All three of them are so different, yet so perfectly developed!  I saw that the textbooks couldn’t possibly account for all of the personal variance that each child contributes to their own development.  That having two babies at the same time was not a repetitive experience – they were both their own unique people from the beginning.  That having another baby didn’t mean he was limited to being either like his sister or like his brother – he had the option to be himself!

I have always parented with a strict “I’m the mom, not the _________” perspective.  If my kid is getting a shot, I’m not there to hold him/her down!  I’m the mom, not the nurse!  If my kid is learning a skill that I used to have/kind of have/could have if I tried, I’m not there to drill them on the intricacies of that skill.  I’m the mom, not the piano teacher/sports coach/etc.!  I love to teach my kids, but not formally.  I love to play with my kids, but not competitively.  I feel the same way about educating my children – I’m the mom, not the teacher.  And I especially feel this way about the intersection of my career as mommy and my career as an SLP.  I do NOT do speech therapy with my kids.  I suppose that I could.  But I don’t want to!  Receiving therapy should be a positive and fun experience.  And receiving parenting should be an affirming and loving experience.  I don’t want to point out specific errors in my kids – no matter how lovingly I do it, I’m still mommy first.  So with my kids, I’m the mom, not the SLP!

When Rissa was 4, I noticed that one particular speech error was sticking around while all of her other baby-like pronunciations quickly disappeared on schedule.  She had a lispy /s/.  It was adorable.  Seriously. And I knew that she wouldn’t qualify for services because you can’t even receive therapy for an /s/ error until you are 7 or so, since so many children are still developing and fine-tuning their tongue movements between 4 and 7 years of age.  But I didn’t want a habit to develop since habits that have been going on for 3 years longer are that much harder to break.  So I asked an SLP friend to do a couple sessions with my daughter.  My friend said she would be happy to work with Rissa, but she really thought she was too young for therapy on her /s/ and would work it out on her own.  I asked another SLP friend, and she said the same thing.  So I took my cute daughter in for a speech and language evaluation (much like I used to perform when I was working with kids), and guess what the SLP said?  “Rissa is fine.  She’s too young for therapy on her /s/ and will work it out on her own.”  Paranoid Mommy reared her ugly head – oops!

Rissa and I went to DQ after her eval and enjoyed Dilly Bars.  I talked her through what had just happened so that she wouldn’t feel weird about it.  I told her what a great job she did at her eval and that Miss Susan was so pleased with how well she was growing and learning.  I felt so silly for even questioning my girl’s skills in the first place, especially since it took three OTHER SLPs to help me understand that she was fine.  Why did I even request the formal eval in the first place?  Stupid Paranoid Mommy!

Within a few months, Rissa’s lisp was gone.  Craziness, right?  It resurfaces once in awhile when she is tired, but for all intents and purposes, she no longer lisps.  And she didn’t just get there on her own.  It was because of the eval!  Miss Susan asked her to try making an /s/ sound with her tongue behind her teeth just to see if she could do it with instruction (I had practiced this with her at home a few times).  Rissa felt so accomplished that she could do it for Miss Susan that she started speech therapy on herself!  She gave herself reminders to keep her tongue behind her teeth.  She corrected her own lisps by redoing them with the new and improved tongue placement.  She showed off her new skills to me and to Matt and to her brothers, and we always clapped and acknowledged that she was learning something new.  She glowed with pride that she could work so hard and accomplish something.  And now it is second nature to her!  It’s such a classic Rissa story.  She decided to become awesome at something, put in the work, and now she’s awesome at it.  Just like that.  I never had to say, “Your /s/ sound is wrong.”  Just hearing someone request a new way was enough to motivate her to learn, without ever feeling like she lacked something.  I suspect that she still might have a lisp that developed into a muscle habit if we hadn’t had that innocuous eval with such a kind person as Miss Susan.

With a newfound resolve to keep Paranoid Mommy from taking over, I chose to delight myself in Nathaniel’s adorable speech errors.  This second time around, I know how quickly toddlers morph into tiny adults in communication skills.  It doesn’t seem so long ago that my twins sounded like toddlers when they spoke, and now they sound like skilled orators!  Plus, in every way, I’m so much calmer this time as a mom.  I’m more relaxed, I’m less stressed by all of the worries that clouded me with the twins.  I have the buoyant hope that children can survive my care!  So despite all of his cute patterns (turning all /k/ sounds into /t/, turning all /g/ sounds into /k/, eliminating the middle syllable out of 3-4 syllable words, simplifying all consonant clusters by deleting one of the consonants), I chose to just enjoy him.  All of those patterns are normal for 2-3 year old kids – they are still learning to organize the rules of vocabulary and grammar when they speak.  It’s only when the patterns stick that there might be a problem.

Nathaniel turned 3 and I wondered if his patterns were sticking… he had settled into a very established groove of forming words and sounds.  I immediately reminded myself, Ehhh, shut up, Paranoid Mommy.  He’s fine!  He’s adorable!  (He IS adorable.  My gosh, he is SO adorable).  He’s not going to head off to college and say, “Ohtay, Mommy, I doe to tah-wedsss now!  Bye-bye!”  He’s fine.

But I know that he has some phonological errors.  Quick SLP lesson:  articulation errors are when an individual has trouble with one or two sounds, like Rissa’s lisped /s/.  Phonology errors are when an individual displays patterns of errors.  All of those patterns I listed two paragraphs ago?  They are PATTERNS.  Phonology is actually my favorite type of therapy to provide.  You make progress with those kids like CRAZY!  You don’t have to drill a /k/ or /g/ sound.  You show them that they are “fronting” – moving their tongue up to their teeth to make /t/ and /d/ and then you show them that they can keep their tongue and the sound in the back of their mouth to make /k/ and /g/.  (You’re all trying it, aren’t you?  Good job!)  Once a /k/ and /g/ successfully happen, bam!  That fronting pattern disappears and a whole category of errors are gone.  It’s seriously amazing.  Thanny’s brain has done an awesome job of categorizing language… he just has a few extra categories.  So we need to redistribute those patterns into some accurate patterns and he will be set.

So I gave him a quick sound inventory test at home and realized that I was right and that he qualified for therapy.  We scheduled a formal eval and found out we’d be seeing Miss Susan again!  Yay!  (Miss Susan works at the outpatient clinic in our health insurance network of providers).  Nathaniel went in today.  He was charming as always and he whipped through her stack of puzzles in record time while she interviewed me about his development and milestones.  (We suggested that he do each one again… most 2 and 3 year olds who come in for speech/language evals do not practice on 100 piece puzzles at home).

Miss Susan used the same sound inventory that I gave Nathaniel so he kept telling her, “Dis da same one Mommy have!”  I found myself quieting my automatic “repeat and expand his utterances” technique during the eval.  It’s extremely valuable and I’d recommend it to anyone who interacts with little people (especially when they are talking on the phone!).  You repeat what they say to indicate that you hear and understand them, but you do it in a grammatically accurate way with correct sound production.  (You know that’s a clown because you saw one on Phineas & Ferb?  Yeah, you DO know that!)  I stopped myself because I wanted Miss Susan to experience him without the benefit of me filling in for the unintelligible parts of what he says so that she would have a good idea of how intelligible his speech is to unfamiliar listeners.

Thanny-man qualifies for weekly phonology therapy and I couldn’t be more thrilled.  He has so much to say and he is so sweet about repeating himself and looking people in the eye so that they can understand him when he is talking, but it would be awesome if he felt understood on a regular basis by someone other than his immediate family members.  It must be so frustrating to constantly repeat himself!  And I get to maintain my role as Mommy instead of trying to master the double-dipping of Mommy/Therapist.  This way, therapy will be fun instead of work!  And I can support his efforts instead of demand them.  I get to attend with him in order to carryover whatever he learns to our home settings.

He will LOVE going for his special therapy time with someone kind and affirming and there are so many TOYS at therapy!  Toys he doesn’t have!  Toys that only exist at preschool!  Toys that he doesn’t have to share because it is an individual therapy session!  And his therapist will LOVE him!  He is eager to please others and to learn, he is smart, he has a loving and supportive family structure, he has a continuously growing list of interests that make planning therapy sessions a cinch (dinosaurs, coloring and drawing, Phineas & Ferb, 1980’s Spiderman cartoons, trains, puppies, vehicles, firefighting…), and he is ridiculously charming and adorable.  He is the very image of the ideal client that I would hope for as an SLP.  He will crank out some quick progress and all of his adorable error patterns will disappear and he’ll sound like a little adult.  Which is somewhat sad for me, but best for him.

I look forward to sharing his particular slice of sunshine with whomever is lucky enough to work with him.  He is a delight and will hopefully be a bright spot in his therapist’s day/week.  And I look forward to him saying, “Can I please have a cookie?”  Until then, I’m pretty thrilled with “Peas me have a tootie?”