good news/bad news

good news: there will be lattes in Meadow Lake! My espresso machine is fixed and back home again. Needed a new pump and some seals. Not cheap, but way cheaper than a new machine. Not bad for a 10 year old machine I got for free at work.

bad news: we have to stay in Vancouver until Feb. 1. That is the earliest we can get the boy in for a speech assessment. After talking to one of the speech pathologists in North Battleford, the wait there would be over a year, so I guess a couple of more days won't be that bad. Just annoying to have to live out of a suitcase for longer. Now if we can only get our furniture arrival to work out.....

On the whole speech thing anyhow....I'm of two minds about it. Since he's been on the wait list for assessment, his vocab has totally exploded and his sentence length has taken off. Great, right...but I still worry. His pronounciation is not where it could be, beyond the typical toddler-speak. I know it's not likely to be a hearing problem, with a kid that has never had any ear infections and can pick out most songs by the first few notes. I think where I do worry is that he does have really strange learning patterns - really ahead in some areas, and not quite there in others. I'm a mom though, so it's my job to worry. But this alphabet/number thing he has is really not typical. I haven't yet met another kid who could identify all his letters at 25 months, most of his peers are nowhere near that yet. Not to mention his counting...forward and backward to 12 and forward to 23, and to 7 in Spanish. Ok, for the Spanish I give credit to Dora the Explorer. :)

I think that it's probably just worth a check to make sure he's doing ok, or how we can best support and encourage his learning style, which doesn't seem to be totally typical. Who knows, maybe we have a genius on our hands....either way, I think just getting a professional opinion will be a good thing. Just a pain that we can't do it earlier. On the upside, maybe we can do a going away party-thingy to be able to say goodbye to friends...