As Jordy and I were driving home from speech therapy today, I was playing my favorite preschool videos on my phone so he could listen to something enriching. Then I thought that it would be nice to write a post about how we identified his speech delay, similar to how we identified when Jia had a soy and milk protein intolerance back in the day (Jordy had the same when he was an infant).

The 2-year checkup

So right at Jordy’s 2nd bday January 2020, he had his well-child exam, the 2-year checkup. I filled out the questionnaire they make you do about food insecurity, if your child can perform certain tasks, and then of course, how many words they use. It was a tough one. Over the previous few months, he’d say a couple key phrases, like “I see sky” and “I see tree” which I thought was great. His verbal skills didn’t really expand beyond that, and I was not entirely sure if Jordy was speech delayed or if he was just “a boy.” As a young parent, it’s pretty common to hear how verbal and mature girls are, compared to boys being more physically capable. Jia was extremely verbal as a young child, and today I even glanced back at my last WSDW post from March 2016 when Jia was 2, and I was loving how she said her first 6-word sentence, which was “No Mei Mei, go in kitchen!” (However, yknow I really think that counts as a four- maybe five- word sentence at best).

So anyway, I filled out the 2-year child questionnaire and brought it to the attention of our Kaiser pediatrician that I really found it challenging to come up with more than 15 words that he’s used. They were pretty basic words, too. Including mommy, daddy, and Jia, ball, blue, blueberry (these 3 he’s known since he was an infant in daycare), bubble, please, wawa, go, bye, more, no, Mei Mei. I requested a speech therapy evaluation. She suggested I also reach out to our state’s 0-3 program. For us in California, it’s the Regional Center, and for us it’s the Regional Center of Orange County (RCOC). She provided me with their intake phone #, but also made the internal referral through the KP system to trigger an assessment.

Connecting with Services

I reached out to Kaiser to get our assessment scheduled, but then also reached out to RCOC anyway not knowing who would be quicker to respond. I think our speech assessment with Kaiser got scheduled for February 18, 2020. I’d already made contact with RCOC and they did their initial intake over the phone. Since I told them we had an assessment scheduled with KP, they wanted to wait to hear their assessment findings first, in case KP would pickup treatment/speech therapy services.

Kaiser: We had our initial assessment at KP, where their Speech Language Pathologist (SLP) did quite a half-ass assessment. It was a lot of parent interview since Jordy had no interest in providing any verbal input into the session, but to me that felt typical. The SLP asked questions about whether or not Jordy does A, B, and C. I would say “Well, hmm…. very rarely,” and since it was a + he marked as Yes. If you’re following where I’m going with this, basically the assessment was quite exaggerated towards the side of his verbal capabilities. He’d ask Jordy to pronounce certain consonants (ie, phonological repertoire), his social skills, . Findings were reviewed with me just a few hours later I think, and they found him to not have significant verbal delays. Looking back at this report, he was estimated to be age-equivalent to a 20 month old at this 25 month evaluation, he was 19th percentile for receptive language and 25th percentile for expressive language. Kaiser ONLY WILL OFFER SPEECH SERVICES under insurance, if you’re at 7th percentile or lower. SEVENTH PERCENTILE. THAT IS EXTREMELY LOW!!!! I was livid. Knowing how few words he had, at this so-called 25th percentile (expressive), how in the world would they only capture kids once they are near rock-bottom expressively, at 7th percentile? That was garbage. So I reached out to RCOC to inform our intake specialist, how we were denied speech therapy and what his percentiles were, and that I thought it was a gross over exaggeration of his abilities, because of the SLP’s method of assessment since Jordy wasn’t able to verbally respond to much of his observation attempts.

RCOC: Our intake specialist came over to our house, I want to say the first week of March, to interview Jordy and myself. So, we didn’t go to daycare that day, since the meeting was in the morning. She asked us a lot of the same questions, but she did review the report Kaiser performed. She entered information into her system after she left, and told me that she believed Jordy to have a significant delay, moreso expressive (what he can say) than receptive (what he understands), but deficits in both areas. I think we were at 12th percentile according to her assessment, and to qualify for services, we had to be I think 17th percentile. I could very well be misremembering. But anyway, we qualified for 2 hours of speech therapy a week, in-home, at no cost since our insurance would not cover it, from May of 2020 through when he turned 3 in January of 2021.

The pandemic hit that second week of March. That meant that finding us a speech therapist that would come to our home would be a challenge, now that things were going remote. I told them how much of a disaster Zoom daycare was, with Jordy’s inattention and all around disinterest in following a story or questions from his teachers on the computer.

Ben, the SLP We Will NEVER Forget

Luckily, RCOC found us Grace Speech Therapy, which was a pretty new company at the time. They found us Ben, a speech therapist with experience working with lots of different types of kids, and little did I know, he had experience working with lots of kiddos on the autism spectrum and other neurodiversities. Growing up he had received therapeutic intervention as well, with his Tourette’s. I really loved Ben’s energy. He reminds me a lot of Blippi (#IYKYK, haha) looking back.

May 18, 2020 – I remember when Ben first came to us, I provided him with a face shield that I’d received from work in the mail, as his speech therapy masks with the clear plastic mouth window, hadn’t arrived yet from his company and the only masks he had made it really hard to enunciate for kids needing to emulate and articulate. He was great with Jordy. He made so many advances, getting his verbal from 15 words to start with, up to about 150 words in just 6 months. I’ll never forget Ben. Ben was the one who helped us realize jordy’s neurodiversity, picking up on Jordy’s mannerisms, and getting us to the right people.

As annoying as Kaiser’s SLP’s assessment was, I’m glad they didn’t find us to need services through insurance. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been connected with RCOC, we wouldn’t have been placed with Ben, and he wouldn’t have initiated referrals that would later help us realize that the reason he had all these challenges (comprehension, fine motor, interpersonal, whatever it was that made things oddly hard for him/us) was because he was on the spectrum.

The rest about Jordy’s diagnosis I’ll share in a later post. I wanted to focus this one on speech.

Preschool Prep Company: Life-Changing Videos for Jordy

Jordy learned his colors, shapes, numbers, letters (differentiating between upper case and lower case) in the early part of the pandemic, right before speech therapy started purely from Preschool Prep Company videos on youtube. If you aren’t into TV for your kids, well, that’s not us, haha. There’s a lot out there that is made to work for early education, and honestly, even in 1st grade, kids are taught to use online resources to build presentations, record videos to submit their homework, etc. so my thoughts are: lean into it and use these things to your advantage!

I highly highly recommend them. Even for Jordy who is all trains, cars, trucks, he was captivated, engaged, and participated when he watched these. They have a cute alphabet song, AEIOU song, and they teach about sentence structure when learning to read.

I learned about them from my nursing school friend Erin, whose daughter benefited from these too. They’re adorable videos that appealed to Jordy right off the bat, and it’s how he’s learned his sight words and phonics. Jordy would see the playlist on the TV and he’d actually say, “I want “On” (video)” because he’d recognize the scene and the letters. The other day, he saw it and said he “I want ‘of’ (video)” for sight words, and we really hadn’t watched these videos in about 6 or so months.

Here they are:

These are the core videos we started with, and we’ve expanded to math, and Jordy learned his colors in Spanish this way too (he’s forgotten them by now, but it worked pretty fast). The scenes they create are really clever, where it holds their attention but also applies the concept. For instance, learning the sound for the letter “b”, there are 2 birds in a nest, and they don’t say “bird,” but instead, they say other words that start with “b” like “brother” and alternate with using the phonetic for B.

Take a look and let me know what you think of these videos and how your kids have responded to them! Were they helpful for you? Have you used them before and love/hate them?

Another account Jordy loved a lot was the Brain Candy TV YouTube Channel. All colors, numbers, multiplication, letters, were done with really cool computer graphics and were all train/car/truck focused. Here are a few of Jordy’s faves just to see what they look like:

I think that’s all for now, but yeah, let me know what you think!!