In addition to becoming a Mommy and, at least temporarily, retiring from her speech therapy career, Alli has gotten into birding since we saw each other last. Everywhere we went this weekend, she pointed out to me the unique sounds of all different kinds of birds. I have a bird feeder on our deck, mostly for the boys' entertainment, and she taught all three of us the names of our frequent visitors. Although I was fascinated by her ability to identify so many birds by their calls, I'm afraid I made a very poor birding student, since my hearing is not the best.
Alli was much more successful at teaching me a few speech therapy skills to work on with Caleb . She said the age four is an important year for honing sounds that have not yet developed naturally. She taught me about auditory bombardment and auditory discriminaton. Even after just two days of being intentional with these things, Caleb is pronouncing the initial "f" sound much more clearly than he was before. I have just gotten used to the sound replacements and ommissions in both boys' speech, and it was good to have a fresh ear (specifically the ear of a seasoned speech therapist) call attention to some easily-corrected articulation errors.
On another note, Alli's husband Damon is really into games. "Into" doesn't accurately describe his relationship with games. He brought a whole suitcase of options for us to play. And to top it off, we were telling him about what we thought was an obscure Asian game that another friend tried to teach us, and he pulled that very game out of his suitcase! Teasing him aside, we did have a lot of fun learning and playing the game Dominion. Marcus added to the fun by interspersing questions from our coffee table "If..." book whenever one of us had to step away from the table.
We had a great weekend with our old friends, and I really hope we don't let another couple of years go by before we do it again.
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