Oh dear God, but I have a question.

Have you ever heard the theory that sometimes, right before a growth spurt (either physical or developmental), you might see a bit of ... regression in your child's behavior? Or perhaps just a general unspecified sort of orneriness? I guess it's the child-development equivalent to "it's always darkest before dawn."

I remember hearing about it when Noah was just a wee little baby. If he'd suddenly stop sleeping or decide to randomly scream for a couple extra hours one day, my kind Internet commenter-people would rush in to assure me that he was simply due for a growth spurt, or perhaps he'd roll over or start crawling soon.

Yesterday I wrote a post at my personal blog about our nothing-short-of-stunning breakthrough in Noah's eating habits. I'm not sure I'm ever going to fully calm down about how instant and miraculous the change has been. A diet of dry tasteless carbs transformed OVERNIGHT to include ... meats! Vegetables! A rainbow of textures and flavors and real honest-to-God nutritional benefits!

All because we turned on a freaking timer.

As someone who's been blogging since before her children were even conceived, I like to think I've developed a pretty good attitude about rude or trollish comments, although it's definitely taken some time and a lot of trial-and-error and embarrassing overreactions.

I generally just shrug and ignore -- I rarely even feel much urge to delete them anymore -- because obviously this person doesn't know me and their opinion about me is just not relevant or even valid, and it's so rarely worth responding or engaging with someone like that in a misguided attempt to "prove" that they're wrong about you.

But sometimes ... oh, they still manage to get under my skin. Oh, but they do.

Someone once told me that speech delays are the "gateway drug" of Early Intervention and special ed. And holy crap, ain't that the truth?

Show of hands: How many of you started out this journey with a simple concern over your child's communication skills?

I can't really count your hands, because, well, I'm still writing this column and y'all are raising your hands in the future, and, well, I'm guessing most of you aren't actually raising your damn hands in front of your computers, but WHATEVER, POINT IS: a speech delay seems to be the easiest and most obvious thing to "catch."

I was filing some school paperwork this week (which is more like "shoving papers into a massively overstuffed binder") and noticed that when Noah first started speech therapy three years ago, he was exactly the same age as Ezra is today: one month shy of his second birthday.

Huh.

When we first told some of our family members that we decided to seek support and services for our child through the school district's special education program (and later, after he actually qualified for the special education program), they were shocked. Shocked that Noah -- sweet, smart, sociable little Noah with all his invisible labels -- qualified in the first place, and that we would actually willingly send our child to public school special ed.

Reader Elizabeth sent me a link to this yesterday: Speak Up for SAY.

In short, according to this website, a small company that makes educational speech and language materials for special needs children is being sued for trademark infringement.

Because they used the word "SAY" in some of their product names.

What? Mistakes? Me? MOI? I am offended at what that title is incinerating. Insinuating, I mean. Whoops.

So mistakes. We've all made a few. I'm NOT writing this to beat myself up or to elicit a ton of "but you're still a good mom!" comments, but just to lay out a few of the lesson I've learned the hard way -- about the system, but mostly about myself -- that now play an active part of me being an even better mom.