My Laila (Pixie) Bug

This is currently how we all feel right now.. So quick recap, Lailas birth to three Speech therapist mentioned she thought Laila fit the typical signs for Apraxia.. A brain issue where the impulse doesnt get to the tongue to tell her how to make the sound.. Leaving us to not have any idea if or when she would/could ever be able to talk in an understandable way..Weve been evaluated couple times, but Laila is my shyest and most stubborn out of all, so it makes it real difficult to make a complete diagnosis.Also hard to diagnose at her age. So the at home therapist mentioned Eastern Illinois University does evaluations in there speech department where the students and high end faculty bascially pick her vocab and sounds and make a diagnosis and report back with all the ways to help. So we made the appt back in November and have been waiting for this end of the month appt with high hopes of more answers.. By time the week actually came Chad and I became pretty bummed out that we would end up no farther in our quests for figuring out anything and assumed Laila would fight way too hard against them to answers.. We were happily proved wrong. Stunningly even.. Sure the first 20 min was Laila crying bloody murder with three therapists crowding her in a room (one being a male which is even worse for her) without her Mom to ease her, but then they came and got me and said lets try with you.. Me and CHad were behind a two way mirror to watch it play out, he ended up staying in there with the three other faculty and therapists to be..So two and a half hours later,they (and more so me) got all the words they needed to hear and an idea on my baby girl and had us wait for a few min to conclude what they figured out. To our surprise they came back happy to report they did not agree with apraxia.. They said she was too smart and receptive and soaring in all other categories that apraxia exhibits that they just kept crossing it off the list :) Plus once they had the mouth puppet out to show her how to move her tongue for the sounds, she copied every single one.They think more of a severe phonological delay.. Which isnt anything to brag about, but sure for us makes us happy to know its not brain related in her case, making it much much more treatable.. She told us in a year we would be surprised with the difference we will see. Between getting her used to people thru preschool and she uses school speech 3 days a week, and hospital speech twice a week, we are doing everything right and getting it all worked out early enough to hopefully have her straightend out once real school begins.I personally am blaming the non stop ear infections and then tubes in her ears for the reason of this, seems to be the big common cause, course Ciara was the same way and is now soaring so could just be my preemie babies. None the less , my sweetie pie has put extra big smiles on our faces this weekend.