Early Intervention Begins...

We had our first meeting with Early Intervention today.  First actual therapy type meeting.  It went really well and I am much more encouraged.  Miss D (as we'll call her) was at our family planning meeting earlier this week and visited us again today.  She will be making visits once a month.  She is very easy going and the girls loved her.  She brought a toy piggy bank to play with today and both girls immediately sat close to play with it and her.  She talked to me about where Kendall is currently at and what she can understand and say ("mama", "dada", "hot", "hi", "uh oh", "that", "dog") and what we do with both girls currently to learn language.  She talked to me about teaching Kendall a couple of baby signs to help ease frustration ('more' and 'all done') and pairing the word with the sign.  She also talked about basically dumbing down how we talk to the girls and making it very simple words and simple phrases (2 or 3 word sentences) and not asking too many questions.

Listening to how she talked with them made me realize more so that I probably do talk above their level a little too much (not like adult to adult but not simple enough either).  I try not to but I think it happens in an effort to talk more.  Everything you read about helping kids verbalize is talk a lot.  But I learned we need to talk more often not necessarily more words.  It will be some retraining for us as well I'm sure.  Miss D worked on 'more' and 'all done' with Kendall.  Seren has recently been picking up on 'all done' with me so she was all over it today and very proud of herself.  Kendall was able to get the 'm' sound of more and was definitely trying to say it.  By the end of the playtime she was able to say 'more' once or twice.  Has she said it to me since?  Not yet but we haven't played again much since they ate lunch and went down for a nap right after the meeting.  Also when Miss D was leaving she said "see ya" to both girls and Kendall definitely tried to say "see ya" back.  Makes me feel like maybe I'm not recognizing her attempts all the time.  Or maybe she just likes talking to others more.  Silly mom is getting boring or something.

But yes all in all I do feel a little better.  Now to just get to work with the new advice and instruction and work on it from there.