It's been 2 years since I posted this. Since we started speech therapy, my son's stutter improved a lot. His teachers get surprised when I tell him that he had a stutter and continues to take speech therapy. He is at that point where his disfluencies can only be noticed by a trained professional speech therapist. When we started therapy, for the first year, the episodes came and went like a roller coaster but after a year or so, he would go longer with minimal disfluencies between episodes. We still notice that when he's tired or goes to bed late or bedtime becomes inconsistent, his disfluencies will increase in the next couple of days. When he's excited or anxious it will also increase. He is still seeing a speech therapist once a week but her focus is on articulation. He's working on "L" "r" blends and "th" sounds. But he's in second grade now and is struggling with his academics. He is behind 2 grade levels in reading and struggles with spelling and sight words. Math is a struggle too but not as much as reading. He sees the reading specialist at school 5 days a week. I'm suspecting that he may be dyslexic or has some sort of learning disability. Right now I am looking to get him evaluated for a learning disability because I don't want to take the "wait and see" approach that his teachers and pediatrician advised me to take when my son first showed speech disfluencies. His elementary school also likes to take the "wait and see" approach, which I'm refusing. I also want to mention that when we started speech therapy, he was seeing one speech therapist who had special certification in stuttering. There are very few specialists in the U.S. and i simply googled it and it gave me the database of all speech therapists with this special certification. What she did that no other speech therapist did was she taught what is called chunking. Chunking words together like with phrases, which I found to really help him. Other tips that any therapist will tell you like role modeling slow speech or turtle talk, which my husband and I did with each other and him also helped.  My son has come a long way. Therapy helps. Consistency helps. And the first signs shouldn't be ignored. I learned this and hope my post and update helps others.  I will update again in the future. Never give up.