She speaks!

Lela got a little bit of a late start on talking. She's been babbling for MONTHS and is has always seemed like she was THIS CLOSE to getting the words out...but not. In December we took her for a developmental evaluation at Johns Hopkins because in addition to the delayed speech we noticed a few other little things that seemed a bit, well, I hate to use the word "concerning," because we really weren't concerned. After all, we're convinced that Lela is the most beautiful, charming, genius baby we've ever seen and Babak and I find her utterly perfect in every way. But she seemed to be frustrated that she wanted to tell us things and couldn't find the way to communicate. Also, she kept falling down and hitting her face (bad balance was the other thing we wanted to have evaluated. Not bad as in, she-just-a-toddler-and-falls-down-a-lot type of bad, but my-child-has-vertigo bad).

The evaluation confirmed that she is perfect and lovely in every way, but that she had an objectively detectable speech delay. At 16 months, Lela's cognitive functioning was on par with an 22-24 month old child (see? genius!), but her expressive language function was even with an 8 month old. The Doctor assured us that delayed speech is often seen in preemies (in fact, she chastized me for forgetting to treat Lela as a preemie. It's true - I haven't thought of her as one in a long time!) and that because Lela was so cognizant and outgoing (dare I say deliciously charming?) and bright, the Doctor was not worried in the slightest about her development. She assured us that Lela will be fully caught up by age 3.

Nonetheless, Lela qualifies for services provided (for free) by a wonderful program administered in our county so we agreed to weekly physical therapy and speech therapy. And, naturally, Lela started speaking her first words the SAME WEEK AS HER FIRST SPEECH THERAPY APPOINTMENT. Just because she wanted to surprise us, I guess.

So, over the last 3 weeks Lela went from saying ZERO words to at least 10. Mama, Dada, Bye, Hi, Ball, More (food), Ma (milk), Moo (goes the cow), WoofWoof (goes the dog) and, of course, No.