Ben's Mouth...

With all the blogging I did yesterday, I can't believe I forgot to mention Ben's mouth...

Since he was born, there has been something different about his mouth.  Not how it looks necessarily, but how it works.  Even when he was learning to drink from a bottle, the NICU nurses mentioned he did a lot of non-nutritive sucking.  We've had a feeding specialist come over and she saw that he had an immature suck-swallow-breathe- pattern.

Since the babes have been babbling, it's become even more noticeable. Nate and Sam have been making all the appropriate sounds, /b/, /d/, /m/.  Ben...not so much.  All the sounds he makes are more guttural and throaty.  His only consonants are /g/, /k/, and /m/ but only when he growls it.  Even his raspberries are weird.  He only uses his lips and they're tight when he does it [go ahead...try that one...].

When he was teensy weensy he was the one who I felt really needed a binky but couldn't hold it in his mouth.  I remember standing over his crib holding the binky in until he fell asleep.  We would even use the swaddlers to help hold the binky in his mouth.

Since then, I've tried everything.  We seriously have every single teething toy known to man.  I went to BRU recently and stood in their teething toy aisle and looked around...Hmm...nothing new here...I've got it all.  We've got vibrating ones, chewy ones, stiff ones, bumpy ones, textures of all shapes and sizes.  You name it, we've got it.  He's the reason why we got the WubbaNubs.

Since we've started feeding solids, he's the one who gags, gags, gags.  He also sticks his fingers down his throat and gags himself.  He seeks the most oral input.  The PT said that because he was so averse to being on his belly for tummy time, he missed out on all that input from pressing his mouth into the floor [who knew that was important?].

Because his EI case worker is a bit of a flake, she hasn't sent over the Oral Motor Consult that he requires per his eval on 6/6.  Hmmm...it's been 2 flippin' months!

So...being that I'm partially high strung special ed teacher and I have a PPO and don't need a referral, I went ahead and went over every body's heads.  I called LGH and got a speech eval and I called the Oral Motor consultant from EI and had her come over.

The long and short of it, is there's nothing wrong...

UMM...my kid sounds like a creature from a Star Wars movie and there's nothing wrong???  Now I've never actually seen a Star Wars movie to know which character he sounds like, but I'm imagining a cross between a wookie and R2D2...