Speech Therapy....

This morning I went to the Damansara Specialist Hospital for Zidani’s first speech therapy session. At 4 years old, he hasn’t been able to speak properly. It must be really frustrating for Zidani and I can see that he’s been trying hard to communicate with people around him. At times, due to his inability to speak properly, he can really test my patience sometimes especially when he’s having his usual tantrums. I find it very difficult trying to understand what he really wants.

I know that Zidani is very ‘talkative’ like his brother Raidi, and I feel sad whenever I see Zidani just look, listen and tries to communicate with his brother. Raidi is surprisingly understanding of his brother’s condition and he smiles back to his brother every time he hears Zidani calling out his name.

Hi!..My name is Zidani Ridzwan

Today was Zidani’s first assessment and the speech therapist told me that he needs to attend a lot of therapy. However, at the same time, she stressed that we have to allocate time for him and conduct the ‘therapy’ ourselves. It’s not limited to speech therapy but for his motoring skills as well. So she wrote down some exercises / activities that we could conduct at home:

1. Playing with cars
   Push around the car and make noises which I think you all know how good I am at making sound effects…heheehe
   Set out instructions like “give me car”, “give me bus..”
2. Blowing activities
   Blowing bubbles, candles, tissue / coloured paper
3. Copying funny faces / sounds – do it in front of the mirror
   I’ll teach him how to make monkey faces..heheheheh
4. Turn taking games
   - Ball rolling
   - Ball kicking
   - Zidani takes turn with brother to build lego tower
5. Functions of object with teddy bears..(I think I’ll substitute this with one of Raidi’s robots)
   Teach him how to use toot brush, towel, cup, spoon, comb
6. Sing songs with actions
   Point to body parts – head, shoulders, knees & toes (I better find a karaoke CD for this)

We have to do this everyday, routinely and will be meeting up with the therapist again in 2 weeks time. The session is quite expensive. Like today, for less than an hour session, I had to pay RM250. So if the session is 4 times a month, that’s a lot of money for me to fork out. This is another personal and family reason why I had to quit TM and look for another job. The cost of living is increasing at a very fast rate and with the household income that we made; it was already quite hard to cope with the living expenses, what else to send Zidani for his one to one therapy sessions. So I guess changing job (with salary increments of course) is the fastest way to cope with the rising inflation.

The love of my life......

To my son Zidani, Abah will always put my energy and attention to you. Abah will try hard and anything to make sure that you will live a beautiful life. I don’t care if I don’t get to live a fancy life to reward myself because as along as you need it, I’ll sacrifice what I have for your development. I’m not really worried about you Raidi. You have your mother’s brain genetic make up. Adik has a slight problem with his development and we just pray that he’ll catch up soon. Still, both of you are my only investment and as for the return, I hope I will get it when I see both of you living successfully.