Speech evaluation

Ben had his speech evaluation tonight. He was a little suspicious of the therapist when she came in, but warmed up quickly and started feeding her pretend food. We did the parent portion first, where she asked me a bunch of questions. I did mention that Ben always bites his tongue at every meal. She said she would watch him eat at the end. When she did the eval, he was very cooperative. Very different from the evaluation we had with the developmental therapist. Of course, after his DT eval, we found out he had an ear infection, (yes, another one! Second one in 2 months since he has had his tubes put in!) So, he was probably in a bit of pain, hence why he was not as cooperative for the DT as he was for the SLP. She did a series of tests on his comprehension as well as articulation. She then had him eat some bread and watched him chew. Boy was he happy to get more food after he thought dinner was over :)

She did give us some suggestions to help him stop biting his tongue, but said his chewing patterns were totally appropriate for a kid his age. She also scored the test while she was here and said he has no delay at all anymore. So, he has gone from a 16& delay at his NICU follow up in December to no delay at all in February! We are SO happy with this! She said she will send the official report in the morning before his annual eval meeting. And she will call in to that. But, she obviously has nothing else to offer us in terms of services unless we have other concerns with feeding in the future.

One thing she also did mention was that she was a bit concerned with the many upper respiratory infections he has. And the fact that his belly is so distended. I said we had mentioned his belly to a few teams. No one ever seemed concerned about it. She recommended calling a pulmonologist about his upper respiratory illnesses, as this can impact speech as well and it can also be a cause of the distended belly. So, we will be calling speech soon as well too. We have so many teams following Ben, what's one more, right? Other than that, there were no recommendations. Which we were pleased with.