My daughter had a very rocky start to life and was intubated in the NICU for 8 weeks with liver failure caused by a blood clot. I was therefore hyper vigilant about development and trawled these threads all the time - I’m therefore posting this for mums in similar situations needing assurance.
The only milestone my daughter “missed” was babbling by 10 months. She just wouldn’t say “baba” or “dada” or anything like that and I was terrified. We had her hearing checked and it was ok and so we started speech therapy at 12 months (people thought I was crazy). The progress was incredibly slow we got some babbling at 12 months (the night before the first speech therapy session) and we got gestures like waving at around 13-15 months but no words. By 18 months she had maybe 5 words including mama and dada (so she missed that 18 month speech milestone too).
I continued to be really concerned. We had another routine hearing check and she failed it completely. It looks like she’d been having intermittent hearing loss from fluid building up in her ears when she had a cold / for weeks after a cold. She had grommets inserted at about 20 months and I expected speech to “come straight away” based on the threads I’d been reading but it just didn’t and so we stuck with the speech therapy - all the while I remained incredibly concerned about her. She started to get frustrated by her speech and was pushing and biting other kids at daycare.
It all turned the corner about 23 months. She started copying words. Bang on 24 months she started putting two words together “more bottle” for example. Then within a week she had three and four and five word sentences: “I need more slide”, “no daddy, you sit there”.
I still don’t think she’s as clear as her peers but she just had a big developmental assessment as part of her post-admission NICU care (Bayley’s test for those familiar) and her expressive language was graded bang on age average and her receptive language was advanced. Speech therapist is happy to stop seeing her. There were no other developmental concerns and we don’t need to go back to the hospital for further assessments.
I know this is a long post but it’s the kind of post I needed for so long, I hope it helps.