About two months ago, I made this post - https://ift.tt/2O44yFo - about my then-22mo son's speech being very delayed, his regular meltdowns, and some other concerns. I was stressing out big time and I got some useful insight and advice from that post, so I thought I'd provide an update.A few hours after I made the post, my son's daycare called that he had a fever, and it turned out to be yet another ear infection. I got him an appointment with the GP the following week and asked for a referral to an ENT to have his ears checked more thoroughly. When my GP went back through his chart, she found that his current ear infection was his sixth one in 14 months, which is well beyond the threshold for a referral.In the meantime, I did some research into speech therapists in my area and got matched with a fantastic woman who has been doing this for 30 years. She has been amazing. She does her appointments at our home so my son is in his environment and comfortable and she can better see how we interact with him. She agreed that he did not present any flags for autism or other developmental issues or delays, just super poor verbal speech (but excellent non-verbal). She gave us a number of points and things to develop and focus on with our son, and we have seen her every two weeks since.We also were given an online screen of about 60 questions from the provincial childhood development agency. My husband and I filled it out separately to see how our answers lined up - we were in agreement on all but one question (and that was just down to different interpretations). Our son flagged 6 questions on my survey and 5 on my husband's. All the flags were only regarding speech development - he did not hit any other flags.Early December we saw the ENT who did a hearing test and an ear exam. Our son had so much fluid built up in his ears that he actually was experiencing mild hearing loss as a direct result of the fluid blocking passage to his ear drums. Both ears showed loss, with the right ear being worse than the left. We were told our son was a prime candidate for ear tube surgery, and we were given a surgery date of January 24.In the 7 weeks between that ENT appointment and the surgery date, our son came down with three more ear infections - the speech therapist was shocked and said in her 30 years she'd never seen a kid develop ear infections as quickly as our son did. However the change in approach to communicating with our son that the speech therapist helped us with was great in helping us get through the tough times and helped us actually feel like we could communicate effectively.Our son's surgery was this past Friday, 4 days ago, and it has been completely night and day. The turnaround has been shocking. The surgeon said his left ear did have some blockage but was better than on the exam 7 weeks prior, but the right ear was a complete disaster, filled completely with fluid and mucus and wax. Tubes were put into both ears and all grossness cleaned out.Our son is a totally new kid. He has been talking NON-STOP for 4 days. A lot of it is still not totally coherent as he will need to re-learn a lot of words (as he's now hearing them differently), but for the first time in about 18 months he's properly hearing his own voice as well as ours. He has come out with 2-3 new words each day, and he just babbles and talks away all day long - his daycare teachers yesterday were floored at the change.He'll have a follow-up with the ENT in 6 weeks, and then hearing tests every 6 months for the next 4 or so years. Hopefully this is the end of ear infections as well.Thank you so much to everyone who commented on my last post - it was great to know I was not alone and to have lots of new ideas around how to best get my son the attention he needed, and I'm so, so, SO relieved that it worked out as well as it has.You guys are great, thank you. via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/38Likof
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