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From the moment Fabu started vocalizing, she seemed to have her own language, which sometimes only FabuMom would understand.  Fabu has always been a happy kid and expressed herself by hugging people.  She did not often get frustrated when she was not understood.  When asked a question she did not understand, she would answer in her own way, smile, hug you, and you clueless as to what she had just said.

We thought the delay initially was because we are a bilingual family, which not only did we speak to her in both English and Spanish, but so did her grandparents and extended family.  We believed Fabu was just confused by both languages, and it was just taking her a little longer. 

Fabu had reached her walking milestone at an earlier age than most other children.  Her pediatrician had said that oftentimes when this happens, other milestones such as language take a little longer to develop. 

Fabu did not start attending daycare until she was 3 years old.  Fabu’s grandparents spent most of the day with her while FabuParents were at school and work. We believed this also had to do with the delay in speech because they catered to her every need, and she did not need to say much to obtain what she wanted and more.  All she would need to do is point a finger, and she would get whatever she wanted.   We believed that she would immediately catch up to where she needed to be concerning her speech as soon as she started school. 

Despite her lack of vocabulary and speech, which she did not understand, Fabu always made sure you understood her by her gestures and acting out what she wanted to say.

Fabu was formally diagnosed with speech delay at 4 years old.

She started receiving speech therapy 2 x week. 

We were hopeful that with therapy, she would quickly overcome the delay. We knew that therapy needed to be aggressive and agreed to 2 x week.

Her speech therapist was going to Fabu’s daycare 2 x week.  She would get pulled out of her class for each session.  We were hopeful that Fabu would obtain results quickly. 

Fabu went through 3 different therapists within 2 years.  Each of them had the same feedback:  Fabu was a happy and friendly kid who lacked interest during a session, was normally not engaged, did not pay attention, and rejected participating in therapy overall.  Fabu’s improvement was minimal during this time, and we became increasingly more concerned.  

As the first grade was just around the corner, we became worried about all the possible issues that Fabu could face if she did not significantly improve her speech, such as social issues, behavior issues, anxiety, and depression.  This was when we decided to take matters into our own hands. 

Based on the therapists' feedback, our first task was to look for something that she was interested in, wanted to be a part of, and thought was fun.  It was time to get creative!

We tested her level of interest with many things she liked at that time.  We looked for things she found entertaining and was engaged with for long periods of time.  We found that she enjoyed many things but most did not capture her attention for long enough. 

We discovered that her most captured attention was when she watched several kid-friendly YouTube channels and their content.  She kept bugging us about letting her have her own YouTube channel, something we had never even considered.  In a moment of appearing to entertain her idea, we asked her to use her tablet and record herself and make a video of what she would like for us to put on YouTube.  We never imagined she would actually go and do it.  To our surprise, she made several videos which showed her expressing herself better than we had ever seen or heard her before.  This showed us that she had really focused her attention on making those videos, which was something she was interested in and seemed to provide some hope.

We continued to entertain this idea and keep our promise of creating a YouTube channel for her and, with a camera, headed to a park to film her official INTRO video.  After we saw how motivated and engaged she was during filming, we decided to create a YouTube channel for Fabu named FabuRocks.   Fabu, short for Fabulous, has been her nickname since she was born, and Rocks came from her obsession with collecting rocks from wherever we went, where she had a story for each rock she had.