Mark your calendars, the 2011 St. Louis Walk for Children with Apraxia of Speech is tentatively scheduled for the last Saturday in October! These walks are held all across the country to raise awareness of and money for research of Childhood Apraxia of Speech.Perhaps all of our blog readers (which is probably only my mother, mother in law and sisters who feel obliged to read it) do not know that our sweet Isaac was diagnosed with Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS) at the end of last year. CAS is a motor speech disorder in which the brain is not telling the muscles of the mouth/tongue/jaw the exact order and timing of movements to create intelligible speech. The reason for this breakdown in communication between the brain and mouth is largely unknown. One of the largest indicators of Apraxia is a wide discrepency between a child's receptive skills and their expressive skills. Isaac routinely tests well out of his age group for his receptive/comprehensive/logic developlment, yet was unable to put 2 words together to form a sentence at the age of 2. Being told that your child lives in a world where their brain knows what it wants to say, but their mouth is failing them is an emotional roller coaster. Why did this happen to Isaac? What will the future hold for him? Will he ever speak clearly? How will other children treat him if he can't communicate? Does he recognize that he isn't being understood? Having never even heard of CAS before we flung ourselves into research and prepped ourselves to be the best advocates for Isaac we can be.
We are lucky in that Isaac's case is mild, that he was diagnosed early and that he is such a hard worker and so focused. With the help of a wonderful speech language pathologist Isaac is finding his voice. It's been 6 months and countless hours of therapy and he speaks in sentences and has started to sing. Children with CAS often do not sing because the music moves too quickly for them to keep up. Hearing Isaac singing the ABC's (click here for video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBw86PYDqek&feature=related), Happy Birthday and even the Dora theme song make me want to cry with joy. He's becoming confident enough to belt it out! Sure there are still many vowel/consonant combinations Isaac can't make out and he still struggles with certain sounds like "w" but he's making so much progress and we're so proud of him. I'm feeling so much more comfortable that when he starts preschool in the fall the other kids will be able to understand what he is saying. And we carefully chose a school where there is a speech pathologist on staff who will help implement things in Isaac's classroom to help him thrive. As it turns out, Jeff struggled with apraxia as a child as well. I guess the worst thing that happens is Isaac grows up to become a cardiologist.
Don't worry, if you can't come walk with Team Ike in October, we'll most certainly be hitting you up for donations ;) Because every child deserves a voice.
