Sorry it’s still hard for you all to go out to eat. I hope it does get better, and I think it will in time. The big plus about the Indian restaurant we went to was that it has soft lighting, very calm and not loud music playing, the waitstaff is very nice, and the people in the restaurant weren’t loud either. Plus the food is amazing.

It was so nice to be out in a restaurant.

That’s awesome about him labeling things. It would be great if we could all move some from the more concrete into the more abstract, but I guess we have to start somewhere and look for what works best in our respective puzzles.

For us the excitement lately has been in just becoming aware of how much he knows and understands – something that was a big question mark until recently. We have come to appreciate just how wonderfully complex he is. The harder part will be in helping him learn to express himself in all the abstract stuff of life. One thing at a time, though.

I keep thinking there’s something like a cryptography key that will unlock all this, but I know better. It’s slow, hard work, but these are the literal building blocks for going forward.

Either way, our kids really are sounding eerily similar.

So I have to ask the obvious question – what techniques did you use to figure out what he does know? Flash cards have worked well so far. We made color squares by laminating bits of construction paper. I even picked up some sight-word flash cards today to try out next week. This works well for the ‘point-and-pick’ method, but I have no clue how to access how much in the way of abstract thinking he has. For that matter, I’m not sure how he processes and comprehends what he is seeing.

For example, show him a black O on white paper, and he can name it immediately. If you have Sandra Boynton’s “A to Z” book, open it up and look at the O. It’s an O where the middle is an open door with an owl looking out of it. You can look at him and tell this bakes his noodle. It’s like he knows it’s an O but it defies any concept of what he understands as O. You can just watch his mental gears turning trying to incorporate it into his brain.

Give him very literal and very concrete things – like big, black letters or numbers on white paper or solid color squares with no detail – and he’s really picking that up. A more abstract concept like “things with pages are often books, and books are things we read” doesn’t seem to compute with him at all when you show him a picture of a book. You hand him the exact, physical book he wants, and he understands he wants to read that particular book. To get him to equate pointing to a picture of a generic book to something like “I want to read” feels on par at this point like asking him the best route to Mars. Maybe he does understand to some degree, but I get a lot of blank looks back, and that often means we’re not on the path he’s working to communicate on.

Trying to find any way at all to communicate things involving feelings or senses like “my head hurts” or “my tummy hurts” or “I’m hot” has largely gone nowhere. We can intuit a lot of things just by being around him all the time, but days like today illustrate just how far we have to go yet.

J-Man is clearly not feeling that great. We suspect it’s his tummy, but it’s just an educated guess. He woke up way too early today and collapsed for a short power nap later (since he doesn’t nap anymore, that’s a sign in and of itself), then woke up from that pretty cranky. He came downstairs and snuggled up beside me on the floor and didn’t move for about 20 minutes. I can’t remember the last time he did this with me that didn’t involve several consecutive occurrences of vomit. Thankfully, no chunks this time. But he still moaned and whined a lot and generally looked miserable.

This is where the lack of communication is so hard. We have no way of understanding how to help him when he get stuck like this. Sure we can comfort him, but if it’s a physical ailment, there are things we could try to help if we could better understand what’s going on.

Unfortunately, there’s no picture system we can use for “my tummy hurts”, at least not one he would use yet. We’re still several steps behind there.

That’s a rambling way to come back to your original point. 1) How do you keep digging to see how much they really do know, and 2) how might you leverage what they do know into getting communication about other things like feelings and physical pains?

(Remember that in our case, sign language isn’t an alternative. He just doesn’t seem to have the motor skills to do it, for whatever reason, after almost two years of trying. )

Thanks for your comment. You’ve already plowed some of this ground ahead of us, so we’d love to hear more about what you tried and what worked for E.