

The sometimes-crazy-often-mundane-always-exhausting happenings of the Block family! 3 boys, 1 full-time-student/stay-at-home daddy, 1 hard-working mommy along with our four legged friends--Annie the mutt dog, Daisy the Great Dane, and Rumble and Ying Yang the cats.


With your tongue you can feel the roof of your mouth (your hard palate) and if you reach back far enough (hoe you're not tongue-tied!) you can feel where the bone ends and the soft palate begins. Connor's hard palate is structurally normal, although is rather narrow and very high/arched. His soft palate, though, has never functioned correctly. We've known this since he was 4 weeks old and had his first swallow study.
And here's a drawing illustrating it:
The bifid uvula is not a problem in and of itself, it's just a possible sign of a larger problem. Connor's uvula has always appeared normal, but today he was crying when they were looking in his mouth, and every time he inhaled, his uvula took on a slight bifid appearance. Here's why him crying was significant...here's a picture of the anatomy in the mouth (side view):
See how behind the soft palate is the back wall of the throat, and where it connects to the nasal passageways? When you inhale through your nose, the soft palate is relaxed to allow air to pass through your nose into your lungs. When you inhale through your mouth (or exhale through your mouth, as pictured here) the soft palate is supposed to close the back of the throat so the air goes only down (or up), and not also out your nose. The same thing is supposed to happen when you swallow (so food doesn't come out of your nose) and when you speak. Here's an illustration of that, the first picture shows the soft palate closing correctly so speech sounds only come out of the mouth, the second picture shows the soft palate closing incorrectly so sounds are coming out of both the nose and the mouth (see the arrows?):
So the bifid uvula is a sign of a muscular problem in the soft palate, and Connor's speech progression is also indicative of a soft palate problem (there are certain consonant and vowel sounds he ca'nt make before they require him to move his soft palate. For example, make the long E sound, can you feel your palate move? The same with the hard G and hard C or K sounds.)