Finally some answers!

Son went to the speech therapist today. We had waited 5 months for this appointment. His preschool teacher had asked us to have him referred, back in the fall, because he had a relatively large speech impediment....his speech was mostly limited to vowels, with nearly every word starting with M or N, whether it needed one or not. He was frustrated, we were frustrated, his teachers were frustrated, and the other kids wanted nothing to do with him, because nobody could understand him. I could, mostly, but even I had a hard time sometimes, and it led to a lot of crying and temper tantrums. I can only imagine how hard it must be to try so hard to get your thoughts across, and have nobody understand, to have people look at you and go "Oh, that's nice", in that "I don't understand you, so I'll smile and nod" sort of way.
He had his hearing tested last week, and he has perfect hearing, which was a relief....after all those ear infections in his first 8 months, before they did the surgery to put the tubes in, there was the fear that he would have some hearing loss.
Anyway, as I said, we went today, and met with the nice lady, who had him playing with toys and helping her read a story, so she could listen to his speech. First of all, she was extremely impressed with his huge vocabulary and sentence structures (he's 3 1/2)...but she noticed he could not say any of the back-of-the-mouth sounds like hard C and G, and that when he tried to say any of those words, he was compensating by scrunching up his nose really tight, in an effort to keep the air from coming out his nose. She looked at his split uvula and wrote her notes.
He got a V-tech computer for Christmas, which made a HUGE difference for him, as there is this little monkey that talks on it, and one of the activities is dealing with the sound of letters...."The S makes the sound SSSSSSS"....that sort of thing, so of course we have had nearly 2 months of him announcing to us what sound each letter makes....which has increased his letter sound capacity drastically....all but those hard C and G and that area of the mouth type sounds.
The answer we got was this....she suspects he has what is called a sub-mucal cleft...essentially a cleft of the muscles in the soft palate, as far as I can figure. This would make perfect sense, based on the fact that Husband was born with a cleft palate which required surgery at age 1 or 2. He will see one of the experts somewhere in the next 2 months who will check and confirm this. If he does indeed have this, they can do surgery which will correct it, and allow him (obviously with therapy) to talk properly and make those pesky, elusive sounds. In the meantime, he will go back to the therapist about once a week to play games which will help him to work on those sounds, in the event that it is not a sub-mucal cleft, so that maybe he will learn techniques to help himself say those needed sounds.
Finally some definite answers, some definite solutions, and we are officially in the system, so everything will get done without waiting so long now. It's been a good day.