I hold this picture dear to my heart, it’s of a beautiful picture of Leah actually looking at the camera and smiling. But this very picture was used in her PECS book for years as her “I want card.”
Leah’s evolution of speech has been a slow, inconsistent process that started out with simple eye contact, then moved to sign language, transitioned to her using PECS (Picture Exchange Communication System), to one-word utterances and then to a few words with prompts. To this day I cannot have a simple conversation like most have with their children. But there was a time in her life where I was also told that Leah may never speak and as a mother, I could never come to terms with that.
In the beginning we used basic signs to help teach Leah on how to communicate with us, such as help, please, thank you, open, book, eat and drink; are just a few that we used frequently. Although it has been years since we used sign language, to this day I often find myself using these signs to help prompt Leah to say thank you or please.
The reason I am sharing this picture is as Leah was progressing through the stages of PECS I was asked by her speech therapist if we wanted to start transitioning to using a electronic device, I told her that I would have to think about it, but at that moment it was a time where my heart broke into a million little pieces. I knew Leah would not eventually need her PECS book and that she would be able to verbally communicate. But during this time, it was a used as a means of communicating with my daughter. When we transitioned to using PECS I spent endless hours taking pictures of preferred objects cutting them down to different sizes to laminate them and to put Velcro on the back of them.
Leah had multiple PECS books that she used, I had one that I always had with me it was small and portable, she also had one that she brought to and from school and then one that we kept at home.
One would say I was almost as stubborn as my daughter, because I was always asked if I could update this small picture of Leah because this was of a younger version of Leah. But to me updating the picture of Leah would mean defeat, I know it is not the way a parent should think but to me I knew that she had it in her that she was going to use words and not have to use pictures to communicate.
The faith and belief I have for my young daughter has and will always be so strong, I have always known that the possibilities are endless with Leah. I knew that this would was just a phase in her development and that there would be a day that I would box up all of her PECS cards to be stored away.
Like I said the evolution of speech is different for all of us, but the life lesson I have learned is we should never take our voices for granted. As you never realize how much work one must go through just to say a simple word.
