The Evaluation

Daelyn had his appointment with the Speech Therapist on Thursday for an Evaluation. We were in some type of a storage room that contained a small round table and a few chairs. The Therapist was a delightful young woman who cautioned Deanna and Dane (who had to go with me because school got cancelled for the day) not to give Daelyn any hints or clues.

She opened a book that had an easel built into it. It stood up and on the heavy cardboard pages were pictures, one per page. She asked Daelyn to tell her what was in the picture.

We started out just fine with a house and a tree. I was shocked at how clearly and articulately Daelyn spoke. I'm not sure he's ever spoken quite that clearly before. Then the pictures got simpler and Daelyn got more detailed. Before long he was making up stories about the pictures.

"That's a picture of a little boy crying because his Mommy told him 'No'!"

"That's a little girl swimming in the McAdam's Pool in the summer."

Then the Therapist made a fatal mistake. She asked him what color the duck on one of the pages was.

"Yellow, orange and black," Daelyn responded. She got a funny look at her face and then laughed.

"That's a new one," she commented. "I've never heard anything but yellow or versions of yellow before." She turned the easel around to look at the picture herself. Sure enough, the duck was yellow, his beak was a bright orange and his eyes were black.

But the Therapist didn't stop there. "What sound does a duck make?" she asked. Daelyn couldn't remember and I asked her if she could tell him.

"I can, but then I have to be certain to put a whole nother sentence between my prompt and his answer, so he's not just repeating." She did that, and Daelyn began quacking.

Then there was the pages of watches. Daelyn didn't respond for several seconds.

"What are those, Daelyn," she asked.

Daelyn looked puzzled. I didn't quite get what the problem was. It was 4 wristwatches. He knows what watches are. Finally, he responded.

"It's hard to say. They're sort of gray and black, but some are white ..." He trailed off as we all realized that his hesitancy wasn't identifying the object, but identifying the color, which he hadn't been asked to do. At least he didn't say, "Tick, tick, tick."

"I don't need to know the colors. Just tell me what those things in the picture are," the Therapist prompted.

"But I'm pretty sure they're black and - what's that color, Mom, like Daddy's car? - and white and a kind of gray ... " He meant silver but still didn't GET that she was looking for the item name, not the color. It took quite sometime for him to say, "Well, they're watches, of course."

The funniest one was a picture of a dark pink, almost red, slimline phone with the receiver off the cradle. Daelyn said, "That's two pink phones." The Therapist's eyebrows went up. She turned the easel around again and snickered.

"I've never had anyone say THAT," she said. "He is SO cute."

"He IS cute," I commented, a fact that we often discuss around our home. "We all agree - it's hard for anybody to get really mad at him, he's so cute. By the way, he's never seen a slimline phone. We only have cordless phones at our house, so to him, that does look like two phones."

She shook her head. "Well, he certainly doesn't lack in the "bright" department."

By the time the Evaluation was over, the Therapist was suitably impressed, as was I, and she determined that Daelyn doesn't qualify for speech therapy. She was able to identify several problem areas for his speech, but all of them are sounds that children are not expected to make until ages 6 or 8. All the 4-yr. old sounds he could clearly say.

Interestingly, though, at one point, he began chatting and the Therapist had to ask me for an interpretation of what he said. This happened twice. I asked her about it.

"How come he speaks so clearly during the testing but slurs his words so badly that you can't even understand him in conversation?"

"That's fairly common," she said. "When children are having to say a single word, they often can articulate it very clearly. However, in conversation, they tend to rush and not work as hard at pronouncing each word separately, so it comes out slurred."

The trick, it seems, is to teach Daelyn to say words one at a time. And to minimize the details.