Lidcombe program and Teeth

Tyler is sure interested in helping me cook. He loves to be involved in all of it. Brandon was a lot like that. I bought this cool knife from papered chef that is safe for little hands. Here he is cutting carrots for our soup. He was so persistent and cut all the carrots I needed.

We started taking him to USU the end of January for speech therapy for his stuttering. We are doing the Lidcombe program, which is a parent induced program which only works on preschool age or younger. Basically they are teaching me how to teach him. I was SUPER nervous and anxious about it, but it is going so amazing!! We have a first year graduate student named Mikenzie teaching us. She is observed (and so are we) through windows that we can't see in. So I feel confident that we are getting the correct information because there is a professor on the other side of the wall listening and helping when needed. Mikenzie is JUST AMAZING!! She is so good at getting Tyler to talk and making things fun for him. I feel really lucky to have her.

The first week he went in at a 12% stuttering rate, which I found out later was quite severe stuttering. The second week he was 8%, and the third week he was 3%!!! He is back up a little bit, but still doing very very well. The first few weeks we had "Smooth talking time" Which was 20 minutes one time each day, where we would play a game or do an activity together where I would praise his smooth talking. At first I had to find things where he would say just one word, because if he said more than one word, it usually wasn't fluent. He could generally say 1 word fluently. So we played memory, pulled things out of a sack, read books that he knew so he could repeat one word. Then I would say something like, that was such a smooth word, or that was great smooth talking....etc. I was suppose to praise as much as I could and still keep it natural. I evaluate him with a number every night according to how well he has done each day. This helps the clinician know how things are going.

After a couple weeks I started correcting his bumpy words, at a ratio of 5 to 1. 5 praises to 1 correction. It is sooooo amazing how much he has changed. He became much more fluent really really fast, lots faster than normal. Mikenzie (our clinician) was really surprised and happy and so were we. We are now doing our smooth talking through out the day. So I am splitting our 20 minutes up and doing it at random times, like in the car, or cooking or eating, or getting ready for bed. We still sometimes do our 'smooth talking times' because he loves it. It is working really well. I wish you all could hear the different in him. Compare him in January to now. USU feels like he could become completely fluent mostly because of his age. Which is amazing to me.

They have no idea why this Lidcombe program works, they just know it does. Somehow all the positive praise helps him rewire his brain. I can see him doing that. On occasion when we are not doing our smooth talking, he will have a bump in a sentence, (which I say nothing about because it's not during our time) I can see him mentally stopping and fixing the word himself, he says it over again and sometimes it is smooth and sometimes it isn't, but he is aware and trying to fix it on his own. It is such a miracle to me. Makes me wonder if I were more positive even part of the time what would happen with my family. For some reason it's so much harder.

So for now we drive to USU on Monday's. It is has been worth every minute and every mile we have driven. He is such a great kid and he's trying so hard. I'm very proud of him.

Heidi lost her first tooth! She pulled it out herself! (This was a few weeks ago, she just lost her other one yesterday, March 8th!!)

These two still love to play together! Heidi is the boss and Tyler is just happy to play anything she wants to play. He misses her a lot during the day.