little miss brynna

right before break we took brynna for her 2-year appt and i told the doctor that we were a little bit concerned about her speech...not that she wasn't talking, because she's starting to pick up, but more because the clarity of her speech, to us, is pretty bad.  of course we don't have much to compare it to except caleb, so we know that our perception might be a little bit skewed.  caleb started talking a little bit later (21 months or so when he really started kicking it into high gear), but from the beginning he was always pretty clear and very vocabulary-rich.  his memory is one of his strongest traits, so picking up language was easy for him because he's really good at mimicking.  he picked up his alphabet and songs and memorizing books really quickly.  that was our baseline, so we definitely were concerned with brynna's speech (or lack thereof).  doctor referred us to a free early intervention program that would do a consultation and diagnosis and offer services for brynna and us if needed. 

the other day we had a meeting with the lady who is going to be our care coordinator.  she met with us for almost an hour and asked us to describe brynna and what she's able to do and what our concerns are.  it was kind of funny being the parent in that meeting because it was run very similarly to a sped meeting and we've always been on the other end of those.  we got our booklet of rights and all the information on the referral process...very familiar to anyone in the doe.  in talking to this lady, though, and telling her what our expectations were and how we were basing this off of what caleb does, i think that we may be wasting their time.  first of all, brynna has a significant buck teeth issue because of her thumb-sucking...and if you try to talk with your teeth sticking out at the top, your speech does become slurred.  that might be a big part of the problem.  part of me thinks that we just expected too much, but i'm so glad that they have these services available for us since it could be that there are other issues that we haven't noticed or we could actually be right about her having some speech issues. 

my only worry is that when the speech therapist and occupational therapist come to do the consultation (which is supposed to last about 2 hrs!), brynna will be her uncooperative self and won't do or say what they ask her to.  i'm praying that she'll surprise me, like she did at the dentist yesterday (i'll write about that later), and be more cooperative than i'm thinking she'll be.  we'll see what happens.