Hello! I was wondering if I could get some advice or perspective on my daughter's speech from some other moms out there.

My daughter just turned two and we have some concerns about her speech. She "says" 75-100 words, some more clearly than others. She drops the end consonant on many of her words. For instance, boat and bow both sound like the word "bow" as she says them, or dog and duck both sound like "duh." Other words (cat, up, sit, all-done, etc.) are fairly clear. My husband and I can figure out most of what she means from context even when some of her words sound the same as each other. We make a point to repeat the word clearly and expand on what she said. If she points to a duck in a book and says "duh," we'll respond along the lines of, "Yes, that's a duck. The yellow duck is swimming!" She likes chattering away a lot and isn't at all hesitant to speak, which is encouraging to us. That said, we've also noticed she says very few two or multi-syllable words, which doesn't seem to be a stumbling block for many of the similarly aged kids in her play group.

The bigger thing we're noticing is that she is still not saying two word phrases, like "mama go" or "bye bye cat" or anything along those lines. She seems to have the words independently, but isn't putting them together in succession, like it seems should be happening by age two. I brought it up at her two-year checkup last week and her pediatrician told us to keep an eye on it for a few months and we'd see how she's doing at her 2 1/2 year check up this summer to look into speech therapy if it hasn't come together then.

My daughter had chronic ear infections and fluid in her ears from the time that she was 10 months old until 19 months old, and our pediatrician encouraged us to give her a little more time at this stage as a result. My daughter had ear tubes put in when she was 19 months old, and it's only then that we started to see her verbalizing more in general. Up until 19 months, she had said maybe 10-15 words (though mainly unintelligible) and we did see her single-word use pick up tremendously over the few months after the tubes went in.

I can't shake that perhaps I should look into some kind of early invention or speech therapy sooner than waiting six months at this stage though - but I'm not sure if I'm overreacting, or if there's something to it! (Isn't that the story of parenting?!) We are expecting a second baby in April and I know that our day to day routine is going to change up then for my two-year old, so if there's something that I could start now to help support her speech better in general, I'd love to get a jump start on it to keep it going more seamlessly once the baby is here. But at the same time, if this is something that will just run it's natural course or if more time doesn't hurt, I don't want to jump in unnecessarily.

Anyway, just curious to see what other moms think or if anyone has been in a similar boat and could offer some perspective. My friends' children haven't had speech issues to help shed any light for me, and my daughter's grandparents think it will "just work out," which (though well-intended) isn't moving us forward. Thank you so much for your help!!