JDawg Speaks & Snakes

I took Jonathan in for a speech evaluation on Friday.  It's been something that I've wanted to do for a while as he is sometimes pretty hard to understand and I would like to be able to go into Kindergarten this fall with all of our bases covered.  We were warned that an evaluation could take upwards of 2 1/2 hours, so we blocked off a whole morning for it.  Our speech pathologist was wonderful - she had a great rep with Jonathan from the get go, a lot of awesome toys and had some great credentials.  She had a set of roughly 150 picture cards that the kids are supposed to identify - this tests vocabulary (ie his language knowledge base) and pronunciation of words (ie his physical speech technique).  She and Jonathan ran through the picture cards in record time and she kicked us out after 35 minutes.  She will give us a formal evaluation with a full scoring in a week, but she said that he was totally fine.  His pronunciation of several sounds that was off was completely age appropriate and that we won't worry about those handful of sounds unless he is still making those mistakes at 7yrs old (which she said that she highly doubted that he would be).  She said that our inability to understand him is due to him trying to speek too fast and that kids pick up those speech pace/patterns from their family.  (Can't imagine who talks fast around him - doot dee doo....)  She said he had excellent language comprehension as well - woot!  At the end, she sent us home with a little pamphlet about how to make him slow down and do "slow and careful" speech to make himself better understood and said that we don't need to come back.  He absolutely rocked it!  Can't even begin to express how happy I am to have that load off - I wish I had done it sooner!

The last few pics are of the kids at the Pacific Science Center this weekend, the live science show was with Esteban the Boa Constrictor.  The kids were absolutely fascinated by him and we learned a ton about snakes.