I'm a speech therapist.
And I almost missed it with my own son.
My mom had been mentioning it for a little while. You know that tone. Well meaning, persistent, hard to ignore. I kept brushing it off.
Then one afternoon I was watching my two boys play together and it hit me. My 16-month-old just… wasn't talking the way his brother had been at that age. And I couldn't unsee it after that.
Here's the embarrassing part. I'm a speech-language pathologist. I know the milestones. I know the red flags. I literally do this for a living. And I still told myself he'd get there.
Because life was busy. I had a three-year-old. I was juggling everything. And with your second you just don't have the same bandwidth. You're surviving, not sitting on the floor narrating every move.
If I don't get ahead of this, and there was something I could have done earlier… I will never forgive myself.
That thought finally got me moving. Not because I was panicking. But because knowing better and not acting on it is a hard thing to live with.
So I got intentional. Way more deliberate. Not with more time, I didn't have more time. Not with therapy appointments, I AM the therapy. But with how I was showing up inside the moments we already had together.
Snack time. Bath time. Car rides. The ordinary stuff. I didn't add anything to my schedule. I just started responding differently in the moments that were already happening.
By 21 months he was using two and three word phrases regularly. Now at almost three he tells me full stories.
And then I thought about all the parents out there who don't have the benefit of being a speech therapist. The ones Googling at midnight. The ones being told to "just wait." The ones who have no idea that the answer might be hiding inside their snack time.
That's why I built Tiny Talkers. Not as a business. As a mom who finally understood that parents deserve to know what we know.
