Standing Tall

Jake is standing on his own for up to 30 seconds more and more consistently now. That is something he has never been able to do before and I am hopeful that he can improve to a minute, then longer and longer after that. To many people, this may sound so insignificant; but to Jake, to us, and to Kevin (his physical therapist), this is a huge milestone.

He is also getting the idea of putting letters together to form words, not exactly spelling them yet, but conceptually, he understands the idea of putting several letters together to make a word. Jake is also identifying many action words; he not only identifies objects by their names, but also by their functions. For example, when asked “where is the umbrella?” he picks out the picture of umbrella. When asked “what do we use when it is raining?” he can also pick out the picture of umbrella amongst other pictures. While his receptive language seems to be improving, his express language remains severely impaired. For whatever reason, he just can not produce sounds other than “b”, “p”, “m”, “o” and recently he started to make the “f” sounds, but those are all the sounds he can make after 3 ½ years of speech therapy. Well, we can’t have everything, can we?! But Dear GOD, we really do want everything, we really really do...