Toby

I absolutely love the name Toby, I love it so much I named my perfect 5 year old son Toby. It started as an infatuation with Tobin Sprout from Guided By Voices. I couldn't listen to his CD enough whilst pregnant and eventually knew that THAT had to be the name. Boy or Girl makes no difference to me, my oldest daughter is named Tristan.

Toby is 5 almost 6. He has been the light in my eyes and the pain in my heart since the day he was born. Toby has Apraxia of Speech. He has a small blip in his brain that doesn't allow him to make speech sounds correctly. He knows what everything should sound like, he just can't get the sound to come out. It has been at times agonizingly painful to watch him chastized by children younger than him for talking funny or completely unintelligably and at other times the highest joy that one can imagine when he masters a sound like T at the beginning of words which is so fundamental to the language that all of the sudden some small doors are opened and he is that much closer to being understood.

I agonized and ached over sending him to kindergarten and the problems he would face, and now, having found what I believe is the best little school in the world-he is on the verge of being a kindergarten graduate. He is happy and confident. He has buddies whom he adores. He fills my heart with joy every day as he races out of school just filled with the happiness of being a little boy, a happy little boy.
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