Overdue update
I am a disastrous diarist. It has been another, ooh, ages since my last post, and it’s not as if I haven’t had anything worth saying. For a start, we’ve moved house. We’ve been on holiday, twice – once to France, just before the move, and once to the Lake District, a few weeks later, stopping off in the Cotswolds on the way back for a wedding. And T has turned four.
That, at least, happened relatively recently (last Sunday, to be precise). We celebrated first in Birmingham, where we’d spent the previous night (our fifth anniversary, as it happens) at a 60th birthday party for Rachel’s uncle Mark, and then at our house with my parents and sisters and kids. We gave her a bike, very slightly too big as it turned out, scuppering our plan never to let her use stabilisers. So that he wouldn’t feel completely left out, J got a little plastic one to sit on. No stabilisers required for that one.
J’s speech is improving, slowly. He has been diagnosed with verbal dyspraxia, and though we don’t think it’s a particularly extreme case it’s clearly going to be a long, slow and wearisome process before he catches up with his contemporaries. But, for the first time, he’s trying. There are very few consonant sounds as yet (m, b, d), so lots of his words are just vague vowel sounds and glottal stops – ah-uh for apple, air-ay for aeroplane, that kind of thing. He’s started to put words together, so ma ba for my bike, say. It’s not great, for a two-and-a-half-year-old, but it’s very definite progress.
