Matthew and Lincoln

Painting with pudding

Lincoln is now 10 months old. He weighs almost 20 pounds and is very tall. He is in the 98th% for height. He hadn't gained much weight from 6-9 months so he has to go back in a couple of weeks to see if he has been gaining. He started crawling at about 8 months. I am guessing that is why his weight gain slowed down. He went from being in the 80% for weight at 6 months to 30% at 9 months. We aren't too concerned, the doc just wants to keep an eye on things. Lincoln waves, claps, dances and has began standing up not holding on to anything. I don't think it will be too long before he takes off walking. He sleeps from about 8:30-8:30 and takes a couple hour nap in the afternoon. He is almost always happy and loves doing anything big brother does. He doesn't have any teeth yet but has no problem eating a whole slice of pizza. I cut everything up for him in tiny pieces and he uses his gums to "chew". He isn't very interested in baby food anymore so we just feed him whatever we are eating. He is an awesome eater. I can't believe he almost isn't a baby anymore!

Yummy finger paint

Matthew has been my awesome helper since I have been hurt. He still goes to gymnastics once a week and loves it. Story time has been put on hold until I can walk again. We have been concerned about his speech and talked to our pediatrician about it at his 3 year check-up. He has a great vocabulary but can be hard to understand at times. We did a hearing test which he passed. The next step was a speech evaluation with a pediatric speech-language therapist. The evaluation showed he has a weak tongue and jaw. He knows how to make and say all the sounds. When the word is more than one syllable he often leaves off the first or last sound of the word. That is because his tongue/jaw is too weak for him to pronounce the whole word. He started going to speech twice a week for 30 minutes. He loves his therapist, Christa, and every morning he asks if it is a speech day. Most of the therapy is through play so he loves being able to go and play with Christa. She says that he is such a good kid and always does everything she asks him too. He has homework that we do with him also. She said that he can recognize that he isn't pronouncing the words how he should. When he is talking we can tell that he tries so hard to say things the right way. The therapist said it could take 6 months to a year of therapy, it all just depends. So far it has been a very good experience for all of us.