It Was An Appropriate Day To Say it

The speech is coming along for Micah. He's been (occasionally) practicing sounds like M's and B's and D's, but never in context of course. He'll use them in babbling like a baby would, but not to say Becky or Daddy or Micah. Those are still Eeeee, A-Eeee, and I-Yah. Small steps, but yet very big ones, too. Apraxia is hard to overcome, especially when you're saddled with so many other handicaps in the brain and mouth.

Tonight Micah was playing with his Cars cast, lining them up and driving them from here to there. He made the usual noises like AAAAHHHHH and GRRRRRRR because cars make all sorts of loud noises like that anyway. But as I was upstairs in the sewing room, I heard him say something completely out of the ordinary for him. He linked syllables. In those syllables, there were the new consonant sounds he'd been practicing. And he said a real word, too.

Obama. My boy said o-ba-ma. (It was really very much like the one with hyphens, with tiny pauses between the syllables.) Now I'm not going all political on you here, because the boy doesn't know anyone in his world named Obama. We don't make it a point to talk about the president in our everyday life, and I highly doubt they do that in school, either. In fact, I think Micah was just putting syllables together and accidentally said a real word. Perfectly. And he said it twice.

The funny thing about apraxia is that the kids have a very hard time remembering how they put things together to make words, so the chances of us hearing o-ba-ma again are slim to none - at least in the near future. But people, we're one step closer to actual and real speech. It'll come someday, and today another stepping stone was laid on that path. Rejoice with me.