The unpredictable return of the lisp

So today I had my meeting with one of the speech therapists at Sophia's school. She's been working with Sophia for about a month already, but this was my first time meeting with her. This nice woman showed me an evaluation of Sophia's "R" sounds. Basicallyshe had Sophia say a list of words with R+vowel blends.Then she marked down which ones Sophia distorted or completely omitted.

Out of all the R+vowel blends that exist in the English language Sophia can say... none of them. That's right. Not a one. Apparently most kids her age don't have them all yet, and it's not abnormal for them to all come later without any intervention but it is rare to have them all missing. She can say some of the consonant-R blends, but not a lot.

Then she talked to me about Sophia's lisp and said that she had been making some headway with Sophia's S's but then both of Sophia's front teeth had fallen out and they can't really do much until they grow back.

I'm not worried about Sophia's speech-I couldn't say my R's or S's growing up and years of speech therapy only contributed to how amazingly awesome I have turned out.

I now know exactly where my tongue should be and what it should be doing when I say the letter S. I can even picture it because in Speech therapy you spend a lot of time in front of a mirror looking at your tongue. I feel that generally I can "get by" with my S's. I don't have clear and crisp language but it is not superbad.

But sometimes the lisp comes back. I have wondered if it's true for other former lispers and I think it is. I'll feel my tongue get stuck in a position and no matter how hard I try to fix how I'm speaking I get stuck with the ethhes for at least a minute or so. This is more likely to happen if I am talking about lisps. In fact, just from writing this post I can feel the lisp just waiting to creep out.

Anyway about halfway through my conversation with the speech therapist I suddenly realized I was going to have a lisp recurrence. It doesn't bother me, it's just a little frustrating. And then all of the sudden the speech therapist broke out in a lisp. She definitely hadn't had one before and then all of the sudden it was there.

I waited until it receded and then (in a normal and not weird way) asked her if she had ever been to speech therapy and she had! I wanted to ask her about her lisp every coming back at weird times but...I couldn't come up with a normal or non-weird way to ask so I didn't.  But anyway it made me feel like we were kindred thpiritth.