Mosey's speech evaluation

I took Mosey down to UT this morning to have an evaluation by the university Speech and Communication Disorders clinic.  I stopped taking Mosey to speech therapy about a year ago.  He had been going for a year before that.  Initially there had been a big improvement, but then disfluency crept back in, and for several months he had been holding steady.  His therapist left when she had a baby, and I decided he wasn't getting enough improvement to warrant continued therapy at $40 for a 30 minute session. 
Over the last few months I've started to think I should put him back in speech therapy.  After being on a waiting list for a long while, we finally were able to have an evaluation at UT.  It was really interesting!
The therapists did several examinations-- first I sat in a little room and talked with Mosey for about 15 minutes so the therapists-- a supervisor and 2 grad students (who were watching on video in another room), could see how we normally interact.  Then they took me to another room and interviewed me, while Mosey had a hearing test (passed with no problems) and a physical exam of his mouth. 
The 2 grad students spent quite a while just talking to Mosey while he showed them several toys he brought along with him (his "Greypelt" Webkinz, dragon, and Hexbug), and then interviewed him, asking him a bunch of different questions about himself and his family, and things relating to his speech.  I started watching the video feed from the other room toward the end of the interview, so I only heard a few of the questions and responses.  When they asked him if anyone in his family was bothered by his speech, he said, "No, except my mom.  She's just worried about it."  I wasn't sure what to think about that.  It's true, I do worry, but I really hope he doesn't think I'm bothered by the way he talks.  I have spent the last year wondering if I pursue therapy for him, if I am going to cause him to be self-conscious and feel like there is something wrong with him, when he clearly does not feel that way now.  I really hope I don't.  I only want to pursue therapy to learn techniques so that if he decides that he wants to speak more fluently, then he will have the skills to be able to do so.  He doesn't seem to have any problem going to therapy, and he has enjoyed it in the past, so I think it's going to be OK.  But of course I worry about it.  I would never, ever want to project my own insecurities onto him, or make him feel any of the embarrassment and humiliation that I felt as a child.  He doesn't feel it now, and I just have to hope and pray that I'm not doing anything to trigger those feelings in him. 
After the interview, the 2 grad students did a drawing exercise with him-- he drew a picture of what he thought his speech looked like.  I was so curious to see what he would draw.  He drew a picture with jagged lines and smooth lines, and then wrote his name with the letters placed randomly around the page.  He said the smooth lines were for when his speech was smooth, and the jagged lines were when he stuttered.  I'm not sure what the random scatter of his name meant; there are all kinds of ways to read that. Later, he said this was his favorite part of the evaluation.  He wished he could have taken his picture home!
After that, they read him a series of statements about his speech, what he thought about it, how he thought others thought about it, etc., etc.  He had a "true" sign that he held up when he thought the statement was true, and a "false" sign for the reverse.  That was also really interesting.  Mosey is such a great kid.  He is so self-confident, and absolutely not self-conscious at all.  I love that about him-- it is such a gift.  He essentially has no personal problem or angst or discomfort regarding his speech, and he is sure that no one else does, either.  He believes it is as easy for him to speak as it is for anyone else. This makes me feel very good about my decision to homeschool.  I got made fun of a lot in school.  Mosey's self-confident enough that maybe teasing would not affect him at all, but it's a risk I would be afraid to take.  As it is, I can only think of a very few times when anyone has even asked about his speech (maybe only one time), and he has certainly never been made fun of for it.
The last thing they did was a receptive vocabulary test.  (Warning: obnoxious bragging mom moment here, feel free to skip this paragraph!)  The therapist placed a flip chart in front of him.  Each page had 4 pictures on it.  The therapist read a word, and Mosey was to touch the picture that the word represented.  This was by far the longest part of the evaluation, because they had him start with the 7 year old list, and he was supposed to go through each successive list until he missed 8 in a section.  Well, he never missed 3 in a section, let alone 8.  They kept going and going through the 7 year old list, 8 year old, 9 year old, etc., etc., etc., until they got up to the 19 year old to adult lists.  After passing the first 2 of those lists, they had him stop because we had run out of time.  He clearly has no trouble with receptive vocabulary.  :-)  I had a copy of the list of words, and it was interesting to see which words he knew that he had to have come across only in his reading.  There were some words I was sure he wouldn't know, but he did.  Reading a lot is by far the best way to develop a good vocabulary.  There was an expressive vocabulary test, too, but they skipped that one since he obviously has no trouble in that arena.
I asked Mosey what he thought after the evaluation was over, and he said he would like to go to therapy.  We'll start next week and go weekly through the summer and then decide what to do.  In some ways, I think it is nice for Mosey to have something that is all *his.*  A time when the attention is all on him, and it is all good, fun, positive attention.  And therapy at UT is covered by our insurance, which is a big plus.  (On the way home, Mosey wanted me to explain all about how health insurance worked so he could understand why we didn't have to pay for speech.) 
The flip side of Mosey's super-confident, high self-esteem coin, is that he may not be particularly motivated to do much work in learning fluency techniques.  Ultimately, everything he learns will only be of use to him if he decides to put it to use!  On the way home I talked to him about that, explaining to him that I think the way he talks is totally fine.  I think he is a great communicator, and I have no problem at all with the way he talks.  But, I told him, there might be times when he is older when he will want to be able to speak more fluently, and he will be glad he learned how to do it.  Ben has been reading some books on voice and speaking so that he can learn to be a better speaker and presenter in the work environment.  It was nice to be able to use that as an example of when he might want to be able to speak more fluently.  Even Dad has to practice his speech!
So, that was how we spent our morning.  We'll see how it goes!