Six Months Ago...

Ahhhh! Frustrating! So, I have been trying to upload a video of Austin 6 months ago for over 24 hours. I'll have to figure out a different way to post the video. Just imagine you are watching the little tow head grunt and squeak and gesture...

This video was taken six months ago, three days after we had little Oliver. And though I find both of our boys to be the cutest little huggable beings on Earth, this post is to talk about our little Einstein, Austin.

In this video, Austin had had his little tongue surgery about 3 or 4 weeks ago, and was about a month into his speech therapy. At that time, he was ranking below the 8 percentile mark in language development. Last week he was testing in the 99th percentile. That blows me away. I love listening to Austin's voice, whether it be using his own words to create new thoughts, repeating what we are saying, or finishing sentences in books. I love watching him think to put his thoughts together and getting his sentence out, often getting stuck on the first word until his mouth catches up with his mind. I asked our therapist how many kids actually score that high, as the questions Austin were answering didn't seem to be anything HUGE to me, and she said she hadn't tested a kid this high in a long time. He was into the questions that are directed at 5 year olds, and he still wasn't "testing out" by getting 5 questions in a row wrong. She finally just stopped testing him as it had been about 40 minutes and he was losing interest in the "game." True, he has educated parents who like to spend time playing and teaching him, but beyond that, he is just a smart kid.

The learning curve on this little guy's speech has been awe inspiring. I feel like I have had the first glimpse at watching our kiddo come over an obstacle that only he could tackle. There was no way for us to MAKE Austin speak, though often I wanted to reach in to his little head and grab the words out with my hands and let him know that I understood him. I have no idea how many times I explained to others that his grunts and squeaks and hand gestures was his way of communicating with us, and we got pretty good at that too. On our group camping trip, a friend of ours who is an OT with toddlers watched Austin with amusement saying how he can certainly get whole sentences out with his little grunts and gestures. How true that statement was.

I watch old videos, and some things that weren't clear to me back then are now so. In one video he was eating a soggy pancake and when I said "soggy" he giggled and said "gy." I never would have caught that. Now it seems so obvious that your tongue has to be able to go up to make that "s" sound. I watch the direction of his eyes and can now picture what he wanted to say, or show us. Oh hindsight...

I love watching him put two things together now and seeing the connections with words he is making. Figuring out that when Mommy and Daddy are with him, we are "both" with him. That when he's asked what cats and dogs and giraffes and elephants are, he says "different things" instead of animals. I like hearing the stories he makes up of his dreams and figuring out what emotions go with what situations.

I listen to Austin and Chris playing in the other room, "Daddy funny..." He runs to me, "Austin come upstairs Mommy" and hugs us all, "Family. Love Family."