Sorry to hijack your thread Mirage and also to treat you like a bit of a 'resident expert' Jimjams but what are the symptoms of apraxia/verbal dyspraxia or is there a good website on it that you could point me to?
I know that you say not to worry about speech output before two but ds seems to say a lot less than most children his age and I can't help worrying a bit.
Ds started babbling with consonants at about 10 months but always seemed a lot quieter than most babies his age. At about 13 months he started to say moo for cows and related beasts () and his own word 'aye aye' for baby/himself. At 16 months he started da da (now daddy) and a couple of weeks ago started bapa for grandpa. He's not quiet any more and says these words as much as he can manage to fit them in.
As far as language/develpomental things go I think he's ok (but he's my first so worry that I don't know whats normal). He started pointing at interesting things with his whole hand at about 11 months and I worried about this until he used his index finger at about 13/14 months. At about 14 months I tried the chat test on him and I think he passed although the pretend play has developed a lot since then so perhaps I was being overly optimistic (ie he'd give his animals a pretend drink but not go through a big rigmarole of making a cup of tea - then again I'm not a big one for tea pots and china either ) He is very shy especially of new people though but not too worried, should I be?
Reasons that make me worry about speech problems to do with apraxia are that, although he's very quick to copy almost everything we do, he doesn't seem to be able to copy blowing (an elderly friend told me she taught her children to blow out their candles on their 1st birthdays but don't know how realistic this is) and though he tries rasberries this is only a recent thing wheras most babies I knew seem to do this at about 5 months. Also, although he's breastfed (so can obviously suck!) he's always hated no spill cups and prefers to drink out of a beaker without a lid. He's very good at this, can also manage a spoon ok (messy but quite effective) and is generally good at gross motor things like running, squatting, climbing etc.
Realise that I sound like an incredibly daft precious mother here but I worry that I should be getting help with him rather than sitting back thinking he'll get there in his own time. When I asked the GP at about 14 months she said to bring him back if he wasn't making progress but I haven't because I think he is, albeit very slow. Late speech does seem to be a feature of both my dad's and dp's family but I don't feel very reassured by this because 1. they're all pretty sciency, obsessive interest type people and I worry about the result of combination of both sides (should have thought about this before shacking up with a computer geek I suppose), 2. this family lore seems to be pretty unreliable and won't necessarily follow that because they learned to talk at four without having other problems that ds won't.
Anyway, I'd really appreciate anyone's thoughts. Sorry for the really long post but I just don't know what, if anything is significant.