Lily's Voice

I am going to update you all on how Lily's speech is coming along.  Before we adopted Lily, we knew she had a cleft palate and a repaired cleft lip, but we did not know how profoundly that impacts one's speech development.  Even after her palate was repaired in December, she did not seem to be making that many new sounds.

In February, she began early intervention therapy with the county's Infants and Toddlers Program (Early Start).  Once a week, a teacher comes to our home for an hour, and engages Lily with games to help her learn to attend to a task (girlfriend is SUPER active and is almost never still - but has come  long LONG way in the last few months), while all the while working on having her produce sounds.

As you can see, Lily has a lot of fun during these sessions, and big brothers can join in, too.

The parachute is a favorite activity that they get to do.  Aaron and Lily are singing "Twinkle Twinkle" while Lorraine (our teacher), and Nathan are holding it over them.  This is the only time that I have taken pictures instead of participating.  The program is actually for the parents - and it is necessary for a parent or adult to be present at all of the sessions.

Lily helping to put the parachute away.

Lily also began speech therapy in April with a speech pathologist who specializes in velopharyngeal inadequacy at Lucile Packard (Stanford's children's hospital).  30 minutes once a week.   She has made a lot of progress in the past few months.  Some of it, I am sure, is because she is settling in more and probably over the shock of transition and now able to learn and grow freely.  Some of it, though, is definitely because of the implementation of these two programs that are a regular part of our weekly routine.

This will probably be boring to everyone else - but I will record it here so that we can keep track of her progress. . .

Now, Lily can make these consonant sounds in isolation:
B, D, G, K, L, M, N, P, R, S (distorted), W
CH (distorted)

She has a lot of trouble if they occur at the beginning of the word.  She is unable, still, to blend them into the rest of the word.  So, she can say, "D" (like duh) in isolation, but then if I ask her to say "duck," she will drop the "d" sound and say "uck."  At the end of the word is better.  April (her speech pathologist) explained that it is harder to blend the beginning consonant because you need to sustain air flow (and she is still learning how to stretch her soft palate to block off the air that would escape through your nose when speaking).  Haha - take all this with a grain of salt.  This is what I understand - but I could have many mistakes in my explanation.  This quote by Einstein is SO TRUE.

And that's how I feel about this cranio/cleft/speech stuff.  But praise the LORD - He understands everything that's going on with Lily's body and with her development.

Lily has really found her "voice" in many ways.  In the last couple of weeks, she has started yelling for me from across the house.  "Mamaaaaaaaaa!"  Although it is not the best habit to get into, I love the fact that she has now realized the power of words.  You can communicate and make things happen by using your words.

Even without being able to say much, Lily says SO much in other ways.  She knows many signs in ASL, but besides that - she expresses her opinions with body language, pointing, bringing me to see what she wants to show me, and by her expressions.

Thank you always, for praying.

A couple of weeks ago, our pilot light went out in our hot water heater.  The PGand E man came to relight it.  When he saw Lily (who was on my hip), he immediately asked, "Does she have a cleft lip?" The reason he asked, I found out, was because his 15 month old daughter has a cleft palate (repaired).  We shared our experiences and talked about speech stuff.  He said to me, "They will talk when they are ready."

We will wait, dear girl, for you to be ready.  In the meantime, we rejoice with every new sound, every new word, and every step you take.