Today I heard the J-man count to 10! Yes, 1-7 were mostly “cuh-cuh” but when Tim got to 7 and the J-man said “ayyyy” and then Tim repeated “eight,” and the J-man said “niii” I just about wet myself.
Not that I knew this the other day when I was grousing about the whole incorrect minutes from our meeting with the county…
Maybe we should teach him to count in some other language where 1-7 don’t begin with letters he can’t say. Uncle Jason?
Posts that hopefully are similar:
- And colors too?!
- He can type?!?
- J-E-L-L-O!
- The Light at the End of the Tunnel May Not Be an Oncoming Train
- One Syllable At a Time
- A is for…
- Celebrating Our Freedoms By…
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
My son used to count that way too, because he couldn’t say the initial sound of most numbers. Uh, cah, cah… I like to say that he could count before he had the words to do it.
¡Sí, por supuesto! Me alegraría mucho enseñarle al J-hombre como contar en español. ¡Qué padre!
¡Nos vemos mañana!
@Mary (MPJ) – I think that’s got to be it. J-Man used to have the ‘default word’, which was pretty much ‘kuh-kuh’ for everything. We got to where we had no idea what he was using it for, so we just settled on thinking that he was saying something like “keep going” because he liked hearing us talk and sing and tell stories. In hindsight, I think he just couldn’t say anything else, even though he knew what he wanted to say. We got so good at guessing what he wanted that I suppose that was enough for him at that point.
Him knowing more than he could say seems to have proven itself out as whenever he does figure out how to say a sound, the “kuh-kuh” gets replaced by the new sound, which he uses ‘correctly’, a concept I’m learning isn’t as clear cut.
So OPQ (was not long ago something like “oh-oh-kuh-kuh-koo-koo”) has moved closer and is now something like “oh” + his unusual b/p guttoral noise (which he uses consistently for Bs and Ps) + “kuh-koo” (as close to Q as he can get right now). Notice also with “oh” that it’s not always “oh-oh” anymore as he’s getting better about using one syllable for one syllable things instead of repeating it twice and making two syllables out of it. His ability to close off words without adding the extra syllable is slowly improving. Of course, the entire alphabet was “kuh-kuh” for a long time, so this is several generations along.
For a while I wondered whether “kuh-kuh” was an echolalia thing, but I think it’s just the placeholder until he can plug the sound he wants in. Of course, that’s one of the last sounds children master, so obviously he would master it first.
The 64 zillion dollar question then is, how much does he really know and can’t communicate? And most parents of kids who are autistic, apraxic, or both would pay that much to know the answer. J-Man could be capable of doing algebra for all we know at this point. Not much would surprise me the way things have been going.
Thanks for your comment. It’s glad to know this pattern isn’t unique to us. Makes me wonder whether there’s more to this. If anyone else has had similar experiences, we’d love to hear from you.
@JB – In the immortal words of my former classmate, “Co mo say yo’ mamma us ted?”